of all earthly names
most dear to the sons of Israel! Jerusalem, their mother, will be
free, her liberty from a galling yoke will be the crowning reward of
their labours and perils, no foe will now dare to oppose the
conqueror's onward march towards the holy city.

Maccabeus joins in the shout, and shares in the exultation; he tramples
his own private griefs under his feet, that they may cast no gloom over
the triumph which God has vouchsafed to the arms of his people. The
prince raises his helmed head and his victorious right arm towards
heaven, and cries aloud, not with pride, but with glad thanksgiving,
"Behold! our enemies are discomfited! Let us go up to cleanse and
dedicate the sanctuary of Zion!"

CHAPTER XXXVII.

AFTER THE BATTLE.

There are joys as well as sorrows into which the stranger cannot enter,
and which baffle the attempt of the pen to describe; such was that of
Lycidas and Zarah when they first met after the battle of Bethsura.
The maiden had her happiness tempered indeed with something of anxiety
and even alarm, for she beheld the young Greek pale with loss of blood,
exhausted by excessive fatigue, and with his left arm in a sling, but
her mind was soon relieved, for Lycidas had sustained no serious or
permanent injury. The young proselyte was rather glad than otherwise
to carry on his person some token of his having fought under Judas
Maccabeus, and been one of the foremost of those who had stormed
Bethsura.

With Zarah and her attendant for his deeply interested listeners,
Lycidas gave a graphic and vivid description of the fight. Zarah held
her breath and trembled when the narrator came to that thrilling part
of his account which described his own position of imminent peril, when
he would have been precipitated from the top of the wall, had not Judas
Maccabeus come to his rescue.

"I deemed that all was over with me," said Lycidas, "when the prince
suddenly flashed on my sight! Had I not long since given to the winds
the idle fables that I heard in my childhood, I should have deemed that
Mars himself, radiant in his celestial panoply, had burst from the
cloud of war. But the hero of Israel needs no borrowed lustre to be
thrown around him by the imagination of a poet, he realizes the noblest
conception of Homer."

"And Maccabeus was the one to save and defend you! generous, noble!"
murmured Zarah.

"Ay, it seems destined that I should be overwhelmed with an
ever-growing deb