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'Tis sufficient, therefore, for the present, only to leave you this short Abridgement of the Story, as follows: This great Monstrous Bird, call'd the Collective, is very seldom seen, and indeed never, but upon Great Revolutions, and portending terrible Desolations and Destructions to a Country.
And the case is aggravated as I remember Franconi's, which we more or less haunted and which, aiming at the grander style and the monumental effect, blazed with fresh paint and rang with Roman chariot-races up there among the deserts of Twenty-ninth Street or wherever; considerably south, perhaps, but only a little east, of the vaster desolations that gave scope to the Crystal Palace, second of its name since, following not passibus æquis, alas the London structure of 1851, this enterprise forestalled by a year or two the Paris Palais de l'Industrie of 1855.
The generation on which those judgments were executed was greatly depraved, and like the men of Sodom, sinners exceedingly; but their sins alone would not have occasioned those desolations; they were added to the national account, and filled up the measure of national guilt. One of their kings did much to swell that account.
It is true, that in the prospect of the desolations which were foretold by the Saviour and were about to be poured out upon Jerusalem, 'for the present distress, 'the short time' Paul advised, not commanded, a temporary deviation from the order of naturelike an eclipse of the sun or moonfor a 'short time' which no one could wish to be prolonged.
Bartholomew de la Cases, bishop of Chiapa, who was an eye-witness to these desolations, relates that they hunted down the natives with dogs. These wretched savages, almost naked and without arms, were pursued like wild beasts in the forest, devoured alive by dogs, shot to death, or surprised and burnt in their habitations.
As soon as Christ was alone with his disciples he gave them a description of those desolations which is recorded in the following chapter, and is so plain, and made such an impression on the Christians of that day, who were mostly Jews, that they fled at the approach of the Roman armies and escaped the calamities which overwhelmed their nation.
Behold, I will send and take all the families of the north, saith the LORD, and Nebuchadrezzar the king of Babylon, my servant, and will bring them against this land, and against the inhabitants thereof, and against all these nations round about, and will utterly destroy them, and make them an astonishment, and an hissing, and perpetual desolations.
No people were seen in The Mountains, and very little cultivation. There were a few modern antiquities, chiefly the stones of Moorish forts and castles. Many villages in ruins, destroyed in the late wars. And Mohammed, like a thoughtless idiot, ridiculed the rude desolations of his brethren, exulting and calling out to me to see "the cooking places."
That perished people, whose remains in this land so deeply interest him, were the mightiest "builders of ruins" the world has known; but who except the archaeologist would wish to see these piled stones in their naked harshness, striking the mind with dismay at the thought of Time and its perpetual desolations!
"The Lord of Hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our refuge." "Amen!" unconsciously but fervently responded the soft low voice of Katherine Drayton to this prophecy of millennial peace, and this solemn avowal of present confidence in the Most High. Alas! before to-morrow's sun should set, her woman's heart should bleed at the desolations of war brought home to her very hearthstone.
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