w the drooping flowers that she could never restore with
the same childlike enjoyment of the task which had animated her in
former hours! Young though she still was, the emotions of the youthful
days that were gone could never be revived as they had once existed!
As waters they had welled up, and as waters they had flowed forth,
never to return to their source! Thoughts of these former years--of
the young warrior who lay cold beneath the heavy earth--of the
desponding father who mourned hopeless in the room above--gathered
thick at her heart as she turned from her flower-beds--not, as in other
days, to pour forth her happiness to the music of her lute, but to
search laboriously for the sustenance of life.

At first, as she stooped over those places in the garden where she knew
that fruits and vegetables had been planted by her own hand, her tears
blinded her. She hastily dashed them away, and looked eagerly around.

Alas! others had reaped the field from which she had hoped abundance!
In the early days of the famine Numerian's congregation had entered the
garden, and gathered for him whatever it contained; its choicest and
its homeliest products were alike exhausted; withered leaves lay on the
barren earth, and naked branches waved over them in the air. She
wandered from path to path, searching amid the briars and thistles,
which already cast an aspect of ruin over the deserted place; she
explored its most hidden corners with the painful perseverance of
despair; but the same barrenness spread around her wherever she turned.
On this once fertile spot, which she had entered with such joyful faith
in its resources, there remained but a few poor decayed roots, dropped
and forgotten amid tangled weeds and faded flowers.

She saw that they were barely sufficient for one scanty meal as she
collected them and returned slowly to the house. No words escaped her,
no tears flowed over her cheeks when she reascended the steps--hope,
fear, thought, sensation itself had been stunned within her from the
first moment when she had discovered that, in the garden as in the
house, the inexorable famine had anticipated the last chances of relief.

She entered the room, and, still holding the withered roots, advanced
mechanically to her father's side. During her absence his mental and
bodily faculties had both yielded to wearied nature--he lay in a deep,
heavy sleep.

Her mind experienced a faint relief when she saw that the fatal