ed down his face like winter rain on a ruined wall.

Hamilcar resumed:

"If you had loved me as much as him there would be great joy in Carthage
now! How many times did I not call upon you! and you always refused me
money!"

"We had need of it," said the chiefs of the Syssitia.

"And when things were desperate with me--we drank mules' urine and ate
the straps of our sandals; when I would fain have had the blades of
grass soldiers and made battalions with the rottenness of our dead, you
recalled the vessels that I had left!"

"We could not risk everything," replied Baat-Baal, who possessed gold
mines in Darytian Gaetulia.

"But what did you do here, at Carthage, in your houses, behind your
walls? There are Gauls on the Eridanus, who ought to have been roused,
Chanaanites at Cyrene who would have come, and while the Romans send
ambassadors to Ptolemaeus--"

"Now he is extolling the Romans to us!" Some one shouted out to him:
"How much have they paid you to defend them?"

"Ask that of the plains of Brutium, of the ruins of Locri, of
Metapontum, and of Heraclea! I have burnt all their trees, I
have pillaged all their temples, and even to the death of their
grandchildren's grandchildren--"

"Why, you disclaim like a rhetor!" said Kapouras, a very illustrious
merchant. "What is it that you want?"

"I say that we must be more ingenious or more terrible! If the whole of
Africa rejects your yoke the reason is, my feeble masters, that you do
not know how to fasten it to her shoulders! Agathocles, Regulus, Coepio,
any bold man has only to land and capture her; and when the Libyans in
the east concert with the Numidians in the west, and the Nomads
come from the south, and the Romans from the north"--a cry of horror
rose--"Oh! you will beat your breasts, and roll in the dust, and tear
your cloaks! No matter! you will have to go and turn the mill-stone in
the Suburra, and gather grapes on the hills of Latium."

They smote their right thighs to mark their sense of the scandal, and
the sleeves of their robes rose like large wings of startled birds.
Hamilcar, carried away by a spirit, continued his speech, standing on
the highest step of the altar, quivering and terrible; he raised his
arms, and the rays from the candelabrum which burned behind him passed
between his fingers like javelins of gold.

"You will lose your ships, your country seats, your chariots, your
hanging beds, and the slaves who rub your feet! The jackal