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they hastened away to the vale of Siloa, where they took breath a while, and after some recollection and refreshment, they gave an assault to the new wall there; but so faint and weak that the guard beat them off, for between fatigue, despondency, dread and misery, their strength failed them, and they were then scattered soveral ways in sinks and gutters.
The soldiers were now broken loose all over the town, up and down in the streets, with their swords drawn, killing all that fell in their way without distinction, and burning entire houses and whatever was in them, in one common flame. In several places where they entered to search for pillage, they found whole families dead and houses crammed with hunger-starved carcases, so that upon the horror of so hideous a spectacle they came out again empty handed: but the compassion they had for the dead, made them not one jot tenderer to the living, for they stabbed every man they met, till the narrow passages and alleys were choaked up with carcases! so that the channels of the city ran blood as if it had been to quench the fire. In the evening they gave over killing, and at night they fell a-fresh to burning.
The eighth of the month Gorpicus put an end to the conflagration of Jerusalem, (A.D. 70.) and if all the blessings it ever enjoyed from the foundation of it, had been but comparable in proportion to the calamities it suffered in this siege, that city has been undoubtedly the envy of tho world. But the greatest plague of all
