e than half
the population of the city. They spread along the field without the
walls, thousands upon thousands, uncertain whither to fly. The sea had
retired far from the shore; and they who had fled to it had been so
terrified by the agitation and preternatural shrinking of the element,
the gasping forms of the uncouth sea things which the waves had left
upon the sand, and by the sound of the huge stones cast from the
mountain into the deep, that they had returned again to the land, as
presenting the less frightful aspect of the two. Thus the two streams
of human beings, the one seaward, the other from the sea, had met
together, feeling a sad comfort in numbers; arrested in despair and
doubt.

'The world is to be destroyed by fire,' said an old man in long loose
robes, a philosopher of the Stoic school: 'Stoic and Epicurean wisdom
have alike agreed in this prediction: and the hour is come!'

'Yea; the hour is come!' cried a loud voice, solemn, but not fearful.

Those around turned in dismay. The voice came from above them. It was
the voice of Olinthus, who, surrounded by his Christian friends, stood
upon an abrupt eminence on which the old Greek colonists had raised a
temple to Apollo, now timeworn and half in ruin.

As he spoke there came that sudden illumination which had heralded the
death of Arbaces, and glowing over that mighty multitude, awed,
crouching, breathless--never on earth had the faces of men seemed so
haggard!--never had meeting of mortal beings been so stamped with the
horror and sublimity of dread!--never till the last trumpet sounds,
shall such meeting be seen again! And above those the form of Olinthus,
with outstretched arm and prophet brow, girt with the living fires. And
the crowd knew the face of him they had doomed to the fangs of the
beast--then their victim--now their warner! and through the stillness
again came his ominous voice:

'The hour is come!'

The Christians repeated the cry. It was caught up--it was echoed from
side to side--woman and man, childhood and old age, repeated, not aloud,
but in a smothered and dreary murmur:

'THE HOUR IS COME!'

At that moment, a wild yell burst through the air--and, thinking only of
escape, whither it knew not, the terrible tiger of the desert leaped
amongst the throng, and hurried through its parted streams. And so came
the earthquake--and so darkness once more fell over the earth!

And now new fugitives arrived. Grasping the trea