Ch. 21 - Father and Child - Page 2

perished with the first feeble
victims of starvation, had he not been met, during his solitary
wanderings, by some of the members of the congregation whom his piety
and eloquence had collected in former days.

By these persons, who entreaties that he would suspend his hopeless
search he always answered with the same firm and patient denial, his
course was carefully watched and his wants anxiously provided for. Out
of every supply of food which they were enabled to collect, his share
was invariably carried to his abode. They remembered their teacher in
the hour of his dejection, as they had formerly reverenced him in the
day of his vigour; they toiled to preserve his life as anxiously as they
had laboured to profit by his instructions; they listened as his
disciples once, they served him as his children now.

But over these, as over all other offices of human kindness, the famine
was destined gradually and surely to prevail. The provision of food
garnered up by the congregation ominously lessened with each succeeding
day. When the pestilence began darkly to appear, the numbers of those
who sought their afflicted teacher at his abode, or followed him through
the dreary streets, fatally decreased.

Then, as the nourishment which had supported, and the vigilance which
had watched him, thus diminished, so did the hard-tasked energies of the
unhappy father fail him faster and faster. Each morning as he arose,
his steps were more feeble, his heart grew heavier within him, his
wanderings through the city were less and less resolute and prolonged.
At length his powers totally deserted him; the last-left members of his
congregation, as they approached his abode with the last-left provision
of food which they possessed, found him prostrate with exhaustion at his
garden gate. They bore him to his couch, placed their charitable
offering by his side, and leaving one of their number to protect him
from the robber and the assassin, they quitted the house in despair.

For some days the guardian remained faithful to his post, until his
sufferings from lack of food overpowered his vigilance. Dreading that,
in his extremity, he might be tempted to take from the old man's small
store of provision what little remained, he fled from the house, to seek
sustenance, however loathsome, in the public streets; and thenceforth
Numerian was left defenceless in his solitary abode.

He was first beheld on the scenes which these pages present, a man of
austere purpose, of unwearied energy; a valiant reformer, who defied all
difficulties that beset him in his progress; a triumphant teacher,
leading at his will whoever listened to his words; a father, proudly
contemplating the future position which he destined for his child. Far