of the troops increased every day. The soldiers were
spent with fatigue, exhausted with hunger, and harassed with incessant
apprehensions of attacks from their enemies. Thousands of the sick and
wounded that attempted at first to follow the army, gave out by degrees
as the columns moved on. Some were left at the encampments; others lay
down by the road-sides, in the midst of the day's march, wherever their
waning strength finally failed them; and every where broken chariots,
dead and dying beasts of burden, and the bodies of soldiers, that lay
neglected where they fell, encumbered and choked the way. In a word, all
the roads leading toward the northern provinces exhibited in full
perfection those awful scenes which usually mark the track of a great
army retreating from an invasion.

The men were at length reduced to extreme distress for food. They ate
the roots and stems of the herbage, and finally stripped the very bark
from the trees and devoured it, in the vain hope that it might afford
some nutriment to re-enforce the vital principle, for a little time at
least, in the dreadful struggle which it was waging within them. There
are certain forms of pestilential disease which, in cases like this,
always set in to hasten the work which famine alone would be too slow
in performing. Accordingly, as was to have been expected, camp fevers,
choleras, and other corrupt and infectious maladies, broke out with
great violence as the army advanced along the northern shores of the
AEgean Sea; and as every victim to these dreadful and hopeless disorders
helped, by his own dissolution, to taint the air for all the rest, the
wretched crowd was, in the end, reduced to the last extreme of misery
and terror.

At length Xerxes, with a miserable remnant of his troops, arrived at
Abydos, on the shores of the Hellespont. He found the bridge broken
down. The winds and storms had demolished what the Greeks had determined
to spare. The immense structure, which it had cost so much toil and time
to rear, had wholly disappeared, leaving no traces of its existence,
except the wrecks which lay here and there half buried in the sand along
the shore. There were some small boats at hand, and Xerxes, embarking in
one of them, with a few attendants in the others, and leaving the
exhausted and wretched remnant of his army behind, was rowed across the
strait, and landed at last safely again on the Asiatic shores.

[Illustration: THE RETURN OF XERXES TO P