CHAPTER 21.
FATHER AND CHILD.
Forsaken as it appears on an outward view, during the morning of which we now write, the house of Numerian is yet not tenantless.

In one of the sleeping apartments, stretched on his couch, with none to watch by its side, lies the master of the little dwelling.

We last beheld him on the scene mingled with the famishing congregation in the Basilica of St.John Lateran, still searching for his child amid the confusion of the public distribution of food during the earlier stages of the misfortunes of besieged Rome.

Since that time he has toiled and suffered much; and now the day of exhaustion, long deferred, the hours of helpless solitude, constantly dreaded, have at length arrived.
From the first periods of the siege, while all around him in the city moved gloomily onward through darker and darker changes, while famine rapidly merged into pestilence and death, while human hopes and purposes gradually diminished and declined with each succeeding day, he alone remained ever devoted to the same labour, ever animated by the same object--the only one among all his fellow-citizens whom no outward event could influence for good or evil, for hope or fear.
In every street of Rome, at all hours, among all ranks of people, he was still to be seen constantly pursuing the same hopeless search.
When the mob burst furiously into the public granaries to seize the last supplies of corn hoarded for the rich, he was ready at the doors watching them as they came out.

When rows of houses were deserted by all but the dead, he was beheld within, passing from window to window, as he sought through each room for the treasure that he had lost.