Indeed, there was
terror everywhere. High and low, rich and poor, cultured and ignorant,
all shivered in its awful grasp. Upon stately avenues and noisome alleys
it fell with the like blackness of darkness. Women cried aloud to God
with the same agonized entreaty from knees bent on velvet carpets or
bare and dingy floors. Men wandered up and down, prisoners in their own
homes, and cursed or prayed with equal fury or intensity whether the
homes were simple or splendid. Here one surveyed all his costly store of
rare and exquisite surroundings, and shook his head as he gazed, ominous
and foreboding. There, another of darker hue peered out from garret
casement, or cellar light, or broken window-pane, and, shuddering,
watched some woman stoned and beaten till she died; some child shot
down, while thousands of heavy, brutal feet trod over it till the hard
stones were red with its blood, and the little prostrate form, yet warm,
lost every likeness of humanity, and lay there, a sickening mass of
mangled flesh and bones; some man assaulted, clubbed, overborne, left
wounded or dying or dead, as he fell, or tied to some convenient tree or
lamp-post to be hacked and hewn, or flayed and roasted, yet living,
where he hung,--and watching this, and cowering as he watched, held his
breath, and waited his own turn, not knowing when it might come.
CHAPTER XIX
"_In breathless quiet, after all their ills.
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