ith the same monotony of brute force and carnage which marked all the
operations of this merciless war. The darkness of night brought no rest.
The actual combat was suspended, but the besieged were incessantly
occupied in repairing the breaches made by the assailants, while these
were busied in making their dispositions for the last mortal conflict.
In the midst of that deadly struggle, when it seemed that the Cross must
after all go down before the Crescent, a knight was seen on Mount
Olivet, waving his glistening shield to rouse the champions of the Holy
Sepulchre to the supreme effort. "It is St. George the Martyr who has
come again to help us," cried Godfrey, and at his words the crusaders
started up without a feeling of fatigue and carried everything before
them.

The day, we are told, was Friday, the hour was three in the afternoon--
the moment at which the last cry from the cross announced the
accomplishment of the Saviour's passion--when Letold of Tournay stood,
the first victorious champion of the Cross, on the walls of Jerusalem.
Next to him came, we are told, his brother Engelbert; the third was
Godfrey. Tancred with the two Roberts stormed the gate of St. Stephen;
the Provencals climbed the ramparts by ladders, and the conquest of
Jerusalem was achieved. The insults offered a little while ago to the
crucifixes were avenged by Godfrey's orders in the massacre of hundreds;
the carnage in the Mosque of Omar swept away the bodies of thousands in
a deluge of human blood. The Jews were all burnt alive in their
synagogues. The horses of the crusaders, who rode up to the porch of the
Temple, were--so the story goes--up to the knees in the loathsome
stream; and the forms of Christian knights hacking and hewing the bodies
of the living and the dead furnished a pleasant commentary on the sermon
of Urban at Clermont.

From the duties of slaughter these disciples of the Lamb of God passed
to those of devotion. Bareheaded and barefooted, clad in a robe of pure
white linen, in an ecstasy of joy and thankfulness mingled with profound
contrition, Godfrey entered the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and knelt
at the tomb of his Lord. With groans and tears his followers came, each
in his turn, to offer his praises for the divine mercy which had
vouchsafed this triumph to the armies of Christendom. With feverish
earnestness they poured forth the vows which bound them to sin no more,
and the excitement of prayer and slaughter, perh