When I recovered it was to hear the trumpet which proclaims that the first daily sacrifice is to be offered.  I was a priest; this day’s service fell to me; I dared not shrink from the duty which appalled me!  Humanity drove me first to my home, where to my unspeakable relief I found my wife and child happy and unharmed; then I went to the Temple, and began my solemn duties.  I was at the altar, the Levite at my side holding the lamb, when suddenly in rushed the high priest, his face buried in the folds of his cloak, and, grasping the head of the lamb, he snatched the knife from the Levite, plunged it into the animal’s throat, and ran with bloody hands and echoing groans to the porch of the Holy House.  I hastened up the steps after him, and entered the sanctuary.  But—­what I saw there I have no power to tell.  Words were not made to utter it.  Before me moved things mightier than of mortal vision, thronging shapes of terror, mysterious grandeur, essential power, embodied prophecy.  On the pavement lay the high priest, his lips strained wide, his whole frame rigid and cold as a corpse.  And the Veil was rent in twain!

Fleeing from the Temple, I came into a world of black men.  The sun, which I had seen like a fiery buckler hanging over the city, was utterly gone.  As I looked into this unnatural night, the thought smote me that I had brought this judgment on the Holy City, and I formed the determination to fly from my priesthood, my kindred, and my country, and to bear my doom in some barren wilderness.

I ran from the Temple, where priests clung together in pale terror, found my wife and child, and bore them away through the panic-stricken city.  As we journeyed a yell of universal terror made me turn my eyes to Jerusalem.  A large sphere of fire shot through the heavens, casting a pallid illumination on the myriads below.  It stopped above the city, and exploded in thunder, flashing over the whole horizon, but covering the Temple with a blaze which gave it the aspect of metal glowing in a furnace.  Every pillar and pinnacle was seen with a lurid and terrible distinctness.  The light vanished.  I heard the roar of earthquake; the ground rose and heaved under my feet.  I heard the crash of buildings, the fall of fragments of the hills and, louder than both, the groans of the multitude.  The next moment the earth gave way, and I was caught up in a whirlwind of dust and ashes.

II.—­The Son of Misfortune

It was in Samaria I woke.  Miriam, my wife, was at my side.  A troop of our kinsmen, returning from the city, where terror suffered few to remain, had discovered us, and brought us with them on their journey.

On this pilgrimage to Naphtali, my native home, my absence from prayer and my sadness struck all our kinsmen; and Eleazer, brother of Miriam, questioned me thereon.  In my bitterness I said to him that I had renounced my career among the rulers of Israel.  Instead of anger or surprise, his face expressed joy.  He pointed out to me the tomb of Isaiah, to which we were approaching.  “There lies,” said he, “the heart which neither the desert nor the dungeon, nor the teeth of the lion, nor the saw of Manasseh could tame—­the denouncer of our crimes, the scourge of our apostasy, the prophet of that desolation which was to bow the grandeur of Judah to the grave.”