ended from the cauldron bearing a tree in his hand The child
said--

"Macbeth shall be unconquerable till
The Wood of Birnam climbs Dunsinane Hill."

"That will never be," said Macbeth; and he asked to be told if Banquo's
descendants would ever rule Scotland.

The cauldron sank into the earth; music was heard, and a procession of
phantom kings filed past Macbeth; behind them was Banquo's ghost. In
each king, Macbeth saw a likeness to Banquo, and he counted eight kings.

Then he was suddenly left alone.

His next proceeding was to send murderers to Macduff's castle. They
did not find Macduff, and asked Lady Macduff where he was. She gave
a stinging answer, and her questioner called Macduff a traitor. "Thou
liest!" shouted Macduff's little son, who was immediately stabbed, and
with his last breath entreated his mother to fly. The murderers did not
leave the castle while one of its inmates remained alive.

Macduff was in England listening, with Malcolm, to a doctor's tale of
cures wrought by Edward the Confessor when his friend Ross came to tell
him that his wife and children were no more. At first Ross dared not
speak the truth, and turn Macduff's bright sympathy with sufferers
relieved by royal virtue into sorrow and hatred. But when Malcolm said
that England was sending an army into Scotland against Macbeth, Ross
blurted out his news, and Macduff cried, "All dead, did you say? All my
pretty ones and their mother? Did you say all?"

His sorry hope was in revenge, but if he could have looked into
Macbeth's castle on Dunsinane Hill, he would have seen at work a force
more solemn than revenge. Retribution was working, for Lady Macbeth was
mad. She walked in her sleep amid ghastly dreams. She was wont to wash
her hands for a quarter of an hour at a time; but after all her washing,
would still see a red spot of blood upon her skin. It was pitiful to
hear her cry that all the perfumes of Arabia could not sweeten her
little hand.

"Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?" inquired Macbeth of the
doctor, but the doctor replied that his patient must minister to her own
mind. This reply gave Macbeth a scorn of medicine. "Throw physic to the
dogs," he said; "I'll none of it."

One day he heard a sound of women crying. An officer approached him and
said, "The Queen, your Majesty, is dead." "Out, brief candle," muttered
Macbeth, meaning that life was like a candle, at the mercy of a puff of
air. He did not wee