OLINDO AND SOPHRONIA.

Godfrey of Boulogne, the leader of the Crusaders, was now in full march for Jerusalem with the Christian army; and Aladin, the old infidel king, became agitated with wrath and terror.  He had heard nothing but accounts of the enemy’s irresistible advance.  There were many Christians within his walls whose insurrection he dreaded; and though he had appeared to grow milder with age, he now, in spite of the frost in his veins, felt as hot for cruelty, as the snake excited by the fire of summer.  He longed to stifle his fears of insurrection by a massacre, but dreaded the consequence in the event of the city’s being taken.  He therefore contented himself, for the present, with laying waste the country round about it, destroying every possible receptacle of the invaders, poisoning the wells, and doubly fortifying the only weak point in his fortifications.

At this juncture the renegade Ismeno stood before him—­a bad old man who had studied unlawful arts.  He could bind and loose evil spirits, and draw the dead out of their tombs, restoring to them breath and perception.  This man told the king, that in the church belonging to his Christian subjects there was an altar underground, on which stood a veiled image of the woman whom they worshipped—­the mother, as they called her, of their dead and buried God.  A dazzling light burnt for ever before it; and the walls were hung with the offerings of her credulous devotees.  If this image, he said, were taken away by the king’s own hand, and set up in a mosque, such a spell of enchantment could be thrown about it as should render the city impregnable so long as the idol was kept safe.

Aladin proceeded instantly to the Christian temple, and, treating the priests with violence, tore the image from its shrine and conveyed it to his own place of worship.  The necromancer then muttered before it his blasphemous enchantment.  But the light of morning no sooner appeared in the mosque, than the official to whose charge the palladium had been committed missed it from its place, and in vain searched every other to find it.  In truth it never was found again; nor is it known to this day how it went.  Some think the Christians took it; others that Heaven interfered in order to save it from profanation.  And well (says the poet) does it become a pious humility so to think of a disappearance so wonderful.

The king, who fell into a paroxysm of rage, not doubting that some Christian was the offender, issued a proclamation setting a price on the head of any one who concealed it.  But no discovery was made.  The necromancer resorted to his art with as little effect.  The king then ordered a general Christian massacre.  His savage wrath hugged itself on the reflection, that the criminal would be sure to perish, perish else who might.

The Christians heard the order with an astonishment that took away all their powers of resistance.  The suddenness of the presence of death stupified them.  They did not resort even to an entreaty.  They waited, like sheep, to be butchered.  Little did they think what kind of saviour was at hand.