In
solitary places, where the parent, not yet lost to affection, strove to
carry his dying child from the desert roadway to the shelter of a roof;
where the wife, still faithful to her duties, received her husband's
last breath in silent despair--he was seen gliding by their sides, and
for one brief instant looking on them with attentive and mournful eyes.
Wherever he went, whatever he beheld, he asked no sympathy and sought no
aid. He went his way, a pilgrim on a solitary path, an unregarded
expectant for a boon that no others would care to partake.
When the famine first began to be felt in the city, he seemed
unconscious of its approach--he made no effort to procure beforehand the
provision of a few days' sustenance; if he attended the first public
distributions of food, it was only to prosecute his search for his child
amid the throng around him. He must have 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.
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