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Amber Waves Directory 07
Page 08
Twenty-three years elapsed between the First and Second Punic Wars. The power of Carthage, though crippled, was not destroyed; and Hamilcar returned home, burning with hatred against Rome, and determined to renew the war upon a favorable opportunity. But a new and terrible danger threatened Carthage upon her own soil. The mercenary troops, who had been transported from Sicily to Africa at the conclusion of the war, being unable to obtain their arrears of pay, rose in open mutiny. Their leaders were Spendius, a runaway Campanian slave, and Matho, a Libyan. They were quickly joined by the native Libyans, and brought Carthage almost to the brink of destruction. They laid waste the whole country with fire and sword, made themselves masters of all the towns except the capital, and committed the most frightful atrocities. Carthage owed her safety to the genius and abilities of Hamilcar. The struggle was fierce and sanguinary, but was at length brought to a successful issue, after it had lasted more than three years, by the destruction of all the mercenaries. It was called the War without Peace, or the Inexpiable War (B.C. 238).
The great plague of London took place in 1665, one year before the fire. The awful scenes which the whole city presented, no pen can describe. A hundred thousand persons are said to have died. The houses where cases of the plague existed were marked with a red cross and shut up, the inmates being all fastened in, to live or die, at the mercy of the infection. Every day carts rolled through the otherwise silent and desolate streets, men accompanying them to gather up with pitchforks the dead bodies which had been dragged out from the dwellings, and crying "Bring out your dead" as they went along. [Footnote: Sometimes the living were pitched into the cart by mistake instead of the dead. There is a piece of sculpture in the Tottenham Court road in London intended to commemorate the following case. A Scotch piper, who had been wandering in homeless misery about the streets, with nothing but his bagpipes and his dog, got intoxicated at last, as such men always do, if they can, in times of such extreme and awful danger, and laid down upon the steps of a public building and went to sleep. The cart came along in the night, by torchlight, and one of the men who attended it, inserting the point of his fork under the poor vagabond's belt, tossed him into the cart, bagpipes and all. The dog did all he could to defend his master, but in vain. The cart went thundering on, the men walking along by its side, examining the ways for new additions to their load. The piper, half awakened by the shock of his precipitation into the cart, and aroused still more by the joltings of the road, sat up, attempted in vain to rally his bewildered faculties, looked about him, wondering where he was, and then instinctively began to play. The men, astonished and terrified at such sounds from a cart loaded with the dead, fled in all directions, leaving the cart in the middle of the street alone.
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