Welleta Selasse, his only daughter, hearing the danger her father was in, broke suddenly out of Ozoro Esther's apartment, which was contiguous, and rushing into the council-room at the instant he was condemned to die, she threw herself at the ras's feet in an attitude and with an expression of the utmost distress; but the old tyrant spurned her away with his foot, and then ordered her father to be instantly hanged. Welleta Selasse fell speechless to the ground. The father, forgetful of his own situation, flew to his daughter's assistance, and they were both dragged out at separate doors--the one to death, the other to after sufferings more dreadful than death itself; for, though not seventeen, the ras, who was her grandfather, after having deprived her of her parent, so alarmed her by his brutality, that, in despair and agony of mind, she swallowed poison! "I saw her," says Bruce, "in her last moments, but too late to give her any assistance; and she had told her women-servants and slaves that she had taken arsenic, having no other way of escaping from the persecution of the murderer of her father." The next to be tried were Kefla Mariam and Sebaat Laab, who were condemned by the ras to lose their eyes--a very common punishment in Abyssinia to this day. To avoid shocking the reader with any farther details of these horrid cruelties, it will only be observed, that blood continued to be spilt as water, day after day, till the Epiphany; priests, laymen, young men and old, noble and vile, daily found their end by the knife or the cord, while their bodies were hewn to pieces and scattered about the streets. "I was almost driven to despair," says Bruce, "at seeing my hunting dogs, twice let loose by the carelessness of my servants, bringing into the courtyard the heads and arms of slaughtered men, and which I could no way prevent but by the destruction of the dogs themselves; the quantity of carrion, and the stench of it, brought down the hyænas in hundreds from the neighbouring mountains; and, as few people in Gondar go out after it is dark, they enjoyed the streets by themselves, and seemed ready to dispute the possession of the city with the inhabitants. Often, when I went home late from the palace (and it was this time the king chose chiefly for conversation), though I had but to pass the corner of the market-place before the palace, had lanterns with me, and was surrounded with armed men, I heard them grunting by twos and threes, so near me as to be afraid they would take some opportunity of seizing me by the leg; a pistol would have frightened them, and made them speedily run, and I constantly carried two loaded at my girdle; but the discharging a pistol in the night would have alarmed every one that heard it in the town, and it was not now the time to add anything to people's fears. I at last scarcely ever went out, and nothing occupied my thoughts but how to escape from this bloody country by the way of