om
falling. Others, Hornecht among them, pressed past him into the yard.
What did this mean?

Had some new spell been displayed to attest the power of the Hebrew
leader Mesu, who had brought such terrible plagues on the land,--and of
his God.

The yard was absolutely empty. The stalls contained a few dead cattle and
sheep, killed because they had been crippled in some way, while a lame
lamb limped off at sight of the mob. The carts and wagons, too, had
vanished. The lowing, bleating throng which the priests had imagined to
be the souls of the damned was the Hebrew host, departing by night from
their old home with all their flocks under the guidance of Moses.

The captain of the archers dropped his sword, and a spectator might have
believed that the sight was a pleasant surprise to him; but his neighbor,
a clerk from the king's treasure-house, gazed around the empty space with
the disappointed air of a man who has been defrauded.

The flood of schemes and passions, which had surged so high during the
night, ebbed under the clear light of day. Even the soldier's quickly
awakened wrath had long since subsided into composure. The populace might
have wreaked their utmost fury on the other Hebrews, but not upon Nun,
whose son, Hosea, had been his comrade in arms, one of the most
distinguished leaders in the army, and an intimate family friend. Had he
thought of him and foreseen that his father's dwelling would be first
attacked, he would never have headed the mob in their pursuit of
vengeance; nay, he bitterly repented having forgotten the deliberate
judgment which befitted his years.

While many of the throng began to plunder and destroy Nun's deserted
home, men and women came to report that not a soul was to be found in any
of the neighboring dwellings. Others told of cats cowering on the
deserted hearthstones, of slaughtered cattle and shattered furniture; but
at last the furious avengers dragged out a Hebrew with his family and a
half-witted grey-haired woman found hidden among some straw. The crone,
amid imbecile laughter, said her people had made themselves hoarse
calling her, but Meliela was too wise to walk on and on as they meant to
do; besides her feet were too tender, and she had not even a pair of
shoes.

The man, a frightfully ugly Jew, whom few of his own race would have
pitied, protested, sometimes with a humility akin to fawning, sometimes
with the insolence which was a trait of his character, that he h