the rampart to meet a welcome death on the earth beneath.
Famished and despairing, the sentinel crouched on the fortifications
which he had now neither strength to pace nor care to defend, yearning
for the food that he had no hope to obtain, as he watched the grey
daybreak from his solitary post.

While he was thus occupied, the gloomy silence of the scene was
suddenly broken by the sound of falling brick-work at the inner base of
the wall, followed by faint entreaties for mercy and deliverance, which
rose on his ear, strangely mingled with disjointed expression of
defiance and exultation from a second voice. He slowly turned his
head, and, looking down, saw on the ground beneath a young girl
struggling in the grasp of an old man, who was hurrying her onward in
the direction of the Pincian Gate.

For one moment the girl's eye met the sentinel's vacant glance, and she
renewed, with a last effort of strength, and a greater vehemence of
supplication, her cries for help; but the soldier neither moved nor
answered. Exhausted as he was, no sight could affect him now but the
sight of food. Like the rest of the citizens, he was sunk in a heavy
stupor of starvation--selfish, reckless, brutalised. No disasters could
depress, no atrocities rouse him. Famine had torn asunder every social
tie, had withered every human sympathy among his besieged
fellow-citizens, and he was famishing like them.

At the moment when the dawn had first appeared, could he have looked
down by some mysterious agency to the interior foundations of the wall,
from the rampart on which he kept his weary watch, such a sight must
then have presented itself as would have aroused even his sluggish
observation to rigid attention and involuntary surprise.

Winding upward and downward among jagged masses of ruined brick-work,
now lost amid the shadows of dreary chasms, now prominent over the
elevations of rising arches, the dark irregular passages broken by
Ulpius in the rotten wall would then have presented themselves to his
eyes; not stretching forth in dismal solitude, not peopled only by the
reptiles native to the place, but traced in all their mazes by human
forms. Then he would have perceived the fierce, resolute Pagan, moving
through darkness and obstacles with a sure, solemn progress, drawing
after him, like a dog devoted to his will, the young girl whose hapless
fate had doomed her to fall into his power. Her half-fainting figure
might have been