d opened the boxes for them.

"So you are more afraid of them then of me!" cried the Suffet; and his
eyeballs flashed like torches through the smoke upon the tall, pale man
who was beginning to understand. "Abdalonim! you will make him run the
gauntlet before sunset: tear him!"

This loss, which was less than the others, had exasperated him; for in
spite of his efforts to banish them from his thoughts he was continually
coming again across the Barbarians. Their excesses were blended with his
daughter's shame, and he was angry with the whole household for knowing
of the latter and for not speaking of it to him. But something impelled
him to bury himself in his misfortune; and in an inquisitorial fit he
visited the sheds behind the mercantile house to see the supplies of
bitumen, wood, anchors and cordage, honey and wax, the cloth warehouse,
the stores of food, the marble yard and the silphium barn.

He went to the other side of the gardens to make an inspection in their
cottages, of the domestic artisans whose productions were sold. There
were tailors embroidering cloaks, others making nets, others painting
cushions or cutting out sandals, and Egyptian workmen polished papyrus
with a shell, while the weavers' shuttles rattled and the armourers'
anvils rang.

Hamilcar said to them:

"Beat away at the swords! I shall want them." And he drew the antelope's
skin that had been steeped in poisons from his bosom to have it cut
into a cuirass more solid than one of brass and unassailable by steel or
flame.

As soon as he approached the workmen, Abdalonim, to give his wrath
another direction, tried to anger him against them by murmured
disparagement of their work. "What a performance! It is a shame! The
Master is indeed too good." Hamilcar moved away without listening to
him.

He slackened his pace, for the paths were barred by great trees calcined
from one end to the other, such as may be met with in woods where
shepherds have encamped; and the palings were broken, the water in the
trenches was disappearing, while fragments of glass and the bones of
apes were to be seen amid the miry puddles. A scrap of cloth hung
here and there from the bushes, and the rotten flowers formed a yellow
muck-heap beneath the citron trees. In fact, the servants had neglected
everything, thinking that the master would never return.

At every step he discovered some new disaster, some further proof of the
thing which he had forbidden himself