subduing a rebellious province was to starve it. The vineyards had
suffered the same end. The enriched soil of these inclosures, made one
now with the wild at the leveling of their hedges, produced acres of
profitless weeds, green against the rising brown bosom of the
hill-fronts. Here and there were the fallen walls of isolated
homes--wastes of masonry already losing all domestic signs. There were
no gardens; it had been two seasons since the wheat and the barley had
been reaped last, and the seaboard of southern Judea, in the path of
Rome the destroyer, was a wilderness.

Over all this immense slope the eyes of Costobarus wandered. However
he had felt in the preceding days when he looked upon this ruin of the
land of milk and honey, he realized now suddenly and in all its
fearful actuality the predicament of Judea, its despair and the
gigantic travail before those who would save it from the united
sentence passed upon it by God and the powers. Immense dejection
seized him. He looked from the face of the country, upon which not a
single thing of profit showed, toward the bowed head and oppressed
figure of his young and inexperienced daughter who was to put her
tender self between Ruin and its victim. Chills, succeeded by flashes
of fever, swept over him. He raised himself as if to give command to
Aquila but settled back under the canopy, grown immeasurably older and
feebler in that moment of helpless surrender to conditions of which he
had been part an artificer. It was not as if he had made an incautious
move in a political game; it was, as it seemed to him undeniably then,
that he had advanced against the Lord God of Hosts, and there was no
turning back!

He settled slowly into a stunned anguish that seemed to rise
gradually, like a filling tide, shutting out the sunset and the