Roman Pompey, who is now impiously besieging the city of the Most High,
has no assurity that we apply not the lambs thus purchased for the altar,
to the sustenance of the body, rather than of the spirit."

"Now, by the five corners of my beard!" shouted the Pharisee, who belonged
to the sect called The Dashers (that little knot of saints whose manner of
_dashing _and lacerating the feet against the pavement was long a thorn
and a reproach to less zealous devotees-a stumbling-block to less gifted
perambulators)--"by the five corners of that beard which, as a priest, I
am forbidden to shave !-have we lived to see the day when a blaspheming
and idolatrous upstart of Rome shall accuse us of appropriating to the
appetites of the flesh the most holy and consecrated elements? Have we
lived to see the day when---"'

"Let us not question the motives of the Philistine," interrupted
Abel-Phittim' "for to-day we profit for the first time by his avarice or
by his generosity; but rather let us hurry to the ramparts, lest offerings
should be wanting for that altar whose fire the rains of heaven can not
extinguish, and whose pillars of smoke no tempest can turn aside."

That part of the city to which our worthy Gizbarim now hastened, and which
bore the name of its architect, King David, was esteemed the most strongly
fortified district of Jerusalem; being situated upon the steep and lofty
hill of Zion. Here, a broad, deep, circumvallatory trench, hewn from the
solid rock, was defended by a wall of great strength erected upon its
inner edge. This wall was adorned, at regular interspaces, by square
towers of white marble; the lowest sixty, and the highest one hundred and
twenty cubits- in height. But, in the vicinity of the gate of Benjamin,
the wall arose by no means from the margin of the fosse. On the contrary,
between the level of the ditch and the basement of the rampart sprang up a