now looked on
each other, as helpless to replace their exhausted provision of food as
if they had been abandoned on the raft of the shipwrecked in an
unexplored sea, or banished to a lonely island whose inland products
were withered by infected winds, and around whose arid shores ran such
destroying waters as seethe over the 'Cities of the Plain'.

The silence which had long prevailed in the room, the bitter
reflections which still held the despairing father and the patient
daughter speechless alike, were at length interrupted by a hollow and
melancholy voice from the street, pronouncing, in the form of a public
notice, these words:--

'I, Publius Dalmatius, messenger of the Roman Senate, proclaim, that in
order to clear the streets from the dead, three thousand sestertii will
be given by the Prefect for every ten bodies that are cast over the
walls. This is the true decree of the Senate.'

The voice ceased; but no sound of applause, no murmur of popular tumult
was heard in answer. Then, after an interval, it was once more faintly
audible as the messenger passed on and repeated the decree in another
street; and then the silence again sank down over all things more
awfully pervading than before.

Every word of the proclamation, when repeated in the distance as when
spoken under his window, had clearly reached Numerian's ears. His
mind, already sinking in despair, was riveted on what he had heard from
the woe-boding voice of the herald, with a fascination as absorbing as
that which rivets the eye of the traveller, already giddy on the summit
of a precipice, upon the spectacle of the yawning gulfs beneath. When
all sound of the proclamation had finally died away, the unhappy father
dropped the empty bowl which he had hitherto mechanically continued to
hold before him, and glancing affrightedly at his daughter, groaned to
himself: 'The corpses are to be cast over the walls--the dead are to
be flung forth to the winds of heaven--there is no help for us in the
city. O God, God!--she may die!--her body may be cast away like the
rest, and I may live to see it!'

He rose suddenly from the couch; his reason seemed for a moment to be
shaken as he tottered to the window, crying, 'Food! food!--I will give
my house and all it contains for a morsel of food. I have nothing to
support my own child--she will starve before me by tomorrow if I have
no food! I am a citizen of Rome--I demand help from the Senate! Food!
food!'