nomer and philosopher who had been
appointed her tutor, and whom she had loved with all the passion of a
vehement nature--had been kicked out of her father's house by slaves,
for daring to aspire to her hand. She had given him up--she had been
forced to do so; and after she was the wife of another and he had risen
to fame, she had never given him any token that she had not forgotten
him. Two thirds of a century lay between that happy and terrible time,
and the present. He had been dead many a long year, and still she
remembered him, and was thinking of him even now. A singular effort of
fancy showed her herself, as she had then been, and Gorgo--whom she
saw not with her bodily eyes, though the girl was standing in front
of her--two young creatures side by side. The two were but one in her
vision; the same anguish that embittered one life now threatened the
other. But after all she, Damia, had dragged this grief after her
through the weary decades, like the iron ball at the end of a chain
which keeps the galley-slave to his place at the oar, and from which he
can no more escape than from a ponderous and ever-present shadow; and
Gorgo's sorrow could not at any rate be for long, since the end of all
things was at hand--it was coming slowly but with inevitable certainty,
nearer and nearer every hour.

When had a troop of enthusiastic students and hastily-collected
peasant-soldiers ever been able to snake an effectual stand against the
hosts of Rome? Damia, who only a few minutes since had spoken with
such determined encouragement to her son, had terrible visions of the
Imperial legions putting Olympius to rout, with the Libyans under
Barkas and the Biamite rabble under Pachomius; storming the Serapeum
and reducing it to ruin: Firebrands flying through its sacred halls,
the roof giving way, the vaults falling in; the sublime image of the
god--the magnificent work of Bryaxis--battered by a hail of stones, and
sinking to mingle with the reeking dust. Then a cry rose up from all
nature, as though every star in heaven, every wave of ocean, every leaf
of the forest, every blade in the meadow, every rock on the shore and
every grain of sand in the measureless desert had found a voice; and
this universal wail of "Woe, woe!" was drowned by rolling thunder such
as the ear of man had never heard, and no mortal creature could hear
and live. The heavens opened, and out of the black gulf of death-bearing
clouds poured streams of fire; co