CHAPTER 23.
THE LAST EFFORTS OF THE BESIEGED.
We return to the street before the palace.

The calamities of the siege had fallen fiercely on those who lay there during the night.

From the turbulent and ferocious mob of a few hours since, not even the sound of a voice was now heard.

Some, surprised in a paroxysm of hunger by exhaustion and insensibility, lay with their hands half forced into their mouths, as if in their ravenous madness they had endeavoured to prey upon their own flesh.

Others now and then wearily opened their languid eyes upon the street, no longer regardful, in the present extremity of their sufferings, of the building whose destruction they had assembled to behold, but watching for a fancied realisation of the visions of richly spread tables and speedy relief called up before them, as if in mockery, by the delirium of starvation and disease.
The sun had as yet but slightly risen above the horizon, when the attention of the few among the populace who still preserved some perception of outward events was suddenly attracted by the appearance of an irregular procession--composed partly of citizens and partly of officers of the Senate, and headed by two men--which slowly approached from the end of the street leading into the interior of the city.