The enriched soil of these inclosures, made one now with the wild at the leveling of their hedges, produced acres of profitless weeds, green against the rising brown bosom of the hill-fronts.

Here and there were the fallen walls of isolated homes--wastes of masonry already losing all domestic signs.

There were no gardens; it had been two seasons since the wheat and the barley had been reaped last, and the seaboard of southern Judea, in the path of Rome the destroyer, was a wilderness.
Over all this immense slope the eyes of Costobarus wandered.

However he had felt in the preceding days when he looked upon this ruin of the land of milk and honey, he realized now suddenly and in all its fearful actuality the predicament of Judea, its despair and the gigantic travail before those who would save it from the united sentence passed upon it by God and the powers.

Immense dejection seized him.