his mouth; he was as a man, indeed, whom a supernatural power had
entered! The people saw, and shuddered.

"It is a god that inspires the holy man! _To the lion with the
Egyptian_!"

With that cry up sprang, on moved, thousands upon thousands. They rushed
from the heights; they poured down in the direction of the Egyptian. In
vain did the aedile command; in vain did the praetor lift his voice and
proclaim the law. The people had been already rendered savage by the
exhibition of blood; they thirsted for more; their superstition was
aided by their ferocity. Aroused, inflamed by the spectacle of their
victims, they forgot the authority of their rulers. It was one of those
dread popular convulsions common to crowds wholly ignorant, half free
and half servile, and which the peculiar constitution of the Roman
provinces so frequently exhibited. The power of the praetor was a reed
beneath the whirlwind; still, at his word the guards had drawn
themselves along the lower benches, on which the upper classes sat
separate from the vulgar. They made but a feeble barrier; the waves of
the human sea halted for a moment, to enable Arbaces to count the exact
moment of his doom! In despair, and in a terror which beat down even
pride, he glanced his eye over the rolling and rushing crowd; when,
right above them, through the wide chasm which had been left in the
velaria, he beheld a strange and awful apparition; he beheld, and his
craft restored his courage!

He stretched his hand on high; over his lofty brow and royal features
there came an expression, of unutterable solemnity and command.

"Behold!" he shouted with a voice of thunder, which stilled the roar of
the crowd: "behold how the gods protect the guiltless! The fires of the
avenging Orcus burst forth against the false witness of my accusers!"

The eyes of the crowd followed the gesture of the Egyptian, and beheld
with dismay a vast vapor shooting from the summit of Vesuvius in the
form of a gigantic pine-tree; the trunk, blackness--the branches
fire!--a fire that shifted and wavered in its hues with every moment,
now fiercely luminous, now of a dull and dying red, that again blazed
terrifically forth with intolerable glare!

There was a dead, heart-sunken silence; through which there suddenly
broke the roar of the lion, which was echoed back from within the
building by the sharper and fiercer yells of its fellow-beast. Dread
seers were they of the Burden of the Atmosphere, a