my; and Aladin, the old infidel king,
became agitated with wrath and terror. He had heard nothing but accounts
of the enemy's irresistible advance. There were many Christians within
his walls whose insurrection he dreaded; and though he had appeared to
grow milder with age, he now, in spite of the frost in his veins, felt as
hot for cruelty, as the snake excited by the fire of summer. He longed
to stifle his fears of insurrection by a massacre, but dreaded the
consequence in the event of the city's being taken. He therefore
contented himself, for the present, with laying waste the country round
about it, destroying every possible receptacle of the invaders,
poisoning the wells, and doubly fortifying the only weak point in his
fortifications.

At this juncture the renegade Ismeno stood before him--a bad old man who
had studied unlawful arts. He could bind and loose evil spirits, and draw
the dead out of their tombs, restoring to them breath and perception.
This man told the king, that in the church belonging to his Christian
subjects there was an altar underground, on which stood a veiled image of
the woman whom they worshipped--the mother, as they called her, of their
dead and buried God. A dazzling light burnt for ever before it; and the
walls were hung with the offerings of her credulous devotees. If this
image, he said, were taken away by the king's own hand, and set up in a
mosque, such a spell of enchantment could be thrown about it as should
render the city impregnable so long as the idol was kept safe.

Aladin proceeded instantly to the Christian temple, and, treating the
priests with violence, tore the image from its shrine and conveyed it to
his own place of worship. The necromancer then muttered before it his
blasphemous enchantment. But the light of morning no sooner appeared in
the mosque, than the official to whose charge the palladium had been
committed missed it from its place, and in vain searched every other to
find it. In truth it never was found again; nor is it known to this
day how it went. Some think the Christians took it; others that Heaven
interfered in order to save it from profanation. And well (says the
poet) does it become a pious humility so to think of a disappearance so
wonderful.

The king, who fell into a paroxysm of rage, not doubting that some
Christian was the offender, issued a proclamation setting a price on
the head of any one who concealed it. But no discovery was made. The
ne