“Our doctors of the law,” said the master of the house, “reckon the making a feast among good works, and I feel this doubly at the feast of the winnowing, which I make for my servants.” Helon attached himself to the priests and Levites of the place, who, according to the ancient custom of Israel, had also been invited;[20] they received him into their circle and related to him at his request the history of Lydda. This town had been taken possession of by those who had returned from the captivity of the tribe of Benjamin;[21] it had afterwards been reckoned with Samaria, and finally along with Rama and Apherama had been restored to the hero Jonathan by Demetrius Soter.[22] From this subject it was an easy transition to the victory over the Samaritans which the sons of Hyrcanus had just achieved. All these particulars arrested his attention, but none more than a description which an aged Levite gave of the desolation caused by a flight of locusts which he had witnessed in his youth. These locusts are of about the length and thickness of a finger; their numbers are countless, and they form swarms which extend for several leagues in breadth. Such a swarm, when approaching, appears like a mist; when it is arrived, it resembles the falling of thick flakes of snow: the air is darkened and filled with a fearful murmur: they cover the ground and all that grows on it, often to a foot in height, devouring every green thing, grass, corn, and the trunks of young trees. They creep into the houses, destroy clothes and furniture, and besides this, lay their eggs in the ground, which in the course of fifteen or sixteen days become young locusts. The south-east wind brings them, and it is happy for the land when it also drives them into the sea. ----- Footnote 20: Deut. xii. 17, 18. Footnote 21: Ezra ii. 33. Footnote 22: 1 Maccab. xi. 34. ----- The aged Levite had retained such a lively impression of the misery of those times, that he could not cease from describing the plague itself, and the still more dreadful evils of pestilence and famine which it left behind. Helon listened to him with shuddering, and then broke out in the words in which the prophet Joel describes them: