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.
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