a very short space of time he must be surrounded and destroyed. In this
desperate situation he took a desperate resolution: he assembled his
troops, laid before them his plan, concerted the various steps for
carrying it into effect, and then dismissed them as independent wanderers.
So ends the first chapter of the tale.

The next opens in the passes of the Alps, whither by various routes, of
seven or eight hundred miles in extent, these men had threaded their way
in manifold disguises through the very midst of the emperor's camps.
According to this man's gigantic enterprise, in which the means were as
audacious as the purpose, the conspirators were to rendezvous, and first
to recognise each other at the gates of Rome. From the Danube to the Tiber
did this band of robbers severally pursue their perilous routes through
all the difficulties of the road and the jealousies of the military
stations, sustained by the mere thirst of vengeance--vengeance against
that mighty foe whom they knew only by his proclamations against
themselves. Every thing continued to prosper; the conspirators met under
the walls of Rome; the final details were arranged; and those also would
have prospered but for a trifling accident. The season was one of general
carnival at Rome; and, by the help of those disguises which the license of
this festal time allowed, the murderers were to have penetrated as maskers
to the emperor's retirement, when a casual word or two awoke the
suspicions of a sentinel. One of the conspirators was arrested; under the
terror and uncertainty of the moment, he made much ampler discoveries than
were expected of him; the other accomplices were secured: and Commodus was
delivered from the uplifted daggers of those who had sought him by months
of patient wanderings, pursued through all the depths of the Illyrian
forests, and the difficulties of the Alpine passes. It is not easy to find
words commensurate to the energetic hardihood of a slave--who, by way of
answer and reprisal to an edict which consigned him to persecution and