his
feet.

CHAPTER 23.

THE LAST EFFORTS OF THE BESIEGED.

We return to the street before the palace. The calamities of the siege
had fallen fiercely on those who lay there during the night. From the
turbulent and ferocious mob of a few hours since, not even the sound of
a voice was now heard. Some, surprised in a paroxysm of hunger by
exhaustion and insensibility, lay with their hands half forced into
their mouths, as if in their ravenous madness they had endeavoured to
prey upon their own flesh. Others now and then wearily opened their
languid eyes upon the street, no longer regardful, in the present
extremity of their sufferings, of the building whose destruction they
had assembled to behold, but watching for a fancied realisation of the
visions of richly spread tables and speedy relief called up before
them, as if in mockery, by the delirium of starvation and disease.

The sun had as yet but slightly risen above the horizon, when the
attention of the few among the populace who still preserved some
perception of outward events was suddenly attracted by the appearance
of an irregular procession--composed partly of citizens and partly of
officers of the Senate, and headed by two men--which slowly approached
from the end of the street leading into the interior of the city. This
assembly of persons stopped opposite Vetranio's palace; and then such
members of the mob who watched them as were not yet entirely abandoned
by hope, heard the inspiring news that the procession they beheld was a
procession of peace, and that the two men who headed it were the
Spaniard, Basilius, a governor of a province, and Johannes, the chief
of the Imperial notaries--appointed ambassadors to conclude a treaty
with the Goths.

As this intelligence reached them, men who had before appeared
incapable of the slightest movement now rose painfully, yet resolutely,
to their feet, and crowded round the two ambassadors as round two
angels descended to deliver them from bondage and death. Meanwhile,
some officers of the Senate, finding the front gates of the palace
closed against them, proceeded to the garden entrance at the back of
the building, to obtain admission to its owner. The absence of
Vetranio and his friends from the deliberations of the government had
been attributed to their disgust at the obstinate and unavailing
resistance offered to the Goths. Now, therefore, when submission had
been resolved upon, it had been thought