"'This,' said Fausta, 'is the act of a rash and passionate man. Aurelian, before to-morrow's sun has set, will himself repent it. What a single night has destroyed, a century could not restore. This blighted and ruined capital, as long as its crumbling remains shall attract the gaze of the traveller, will utter a blasting malediction upon the name and memory of Aurelian. Hereafter he will be known, not as conqueror of the East, and the restorer of the Roman Empire, but as the executioner of Longinus and the ruthless destroyer of Palmyra.'" After Aurelian has again departed with his army for Rome, the noble Piso and Fausta re-visit the devoted capital. How horribly graphic the description of its desolation: "For more than a mile before we reached the gates, the roads, and the fields on either hand, were strewed with the bodies of those who, in their attempts to escape, had been overtaken by the enemy and slain. Many a group of bodies did we notice, evidently those of a family, the parents and the children, who, hoping to reach in company some place of security, had all--and without resistance apparently--fallen a sacrifice to the relentless fury of their pursuers. Immediately in the vicinity of the walls and under them, the earth was concealed from the eye by the multitudes of the slain, and all objects were stained with the one hue of blood. Upon passing the gates and entering within those walls which I had been accustomed to regard as embracing in their wide and graceful sweep, the most beautiful city of the world, my eye met naught but black and smoking ruins, fallen houses and temples, the streets choked with piles of still blazing timbers and the half-burned bodies of the dead. As I penetrated farther into the heart of the city, and to its better built and more spacious quarters, I found the destruction to be less--that the principal streets were standing, and many of the more distinguished structures. But every where--in the streets--upon the porticos of private and public dwellings--upon the steps and within the very walls of the temples of every faith--in all places, the most sacred as well as the most common, lay the mangled carcasses of the wretched inhabitants. None, apparently, had been spared. The aged were there, with their bald or silvered heads--little children and infants--women, the young, the beautiful, the good--all were there, slaughtered in every imaginable way, and presenting to the eye spectacles of horror and of grief enough to break the heart and craze the brain. For one could not but go back to the day and the hour when they died, and suffer with these innocent thousands, a part of what they suffered when the gates of the city giving way, the infuriated soldiery poured in, and with death written in their faces and clamoring on