their native soil for the fields of the Northern and North-Western States, and when, as one of them once was heard to say, it was no use writing home that he got meat three times a-day, for nobody in Ireland would believe it.  The next item in the list of commendation is the hospital, which your informant also visited, and of which he gives the following account—­’It consisted of three separate wards, all clean and well ventilated:  one was for lying-in women, who were invariably allowed a month’s rest after their confinement.’  Permit me to place beside this picture that of a Southern infirmary, such as I saw it, and taken on the spot.  In the first room that I entered I found only half of the windows, of which there were six, glazed; these were almost as much obscured with dirt as the other windowless ones were darkened by the dingy shutters which the shivering inmates had closed in order to protect themselves from the cold.  In the enormous chimney glimmered the powerless embers of a few chips of wood, round which as many of the sick women as had strength to approach were cowering, some on wooden settles (there was not such a thing as a chair with a back in the whole establishment), most of them on the ground, excluding those who were too ill to rise—­and these poor wretches lay prostrate on the earth, without bedstead, bed, mattress, or pillow, with no covering but the clothes they had on and some filthy rags of blanket in which they endeavoured to wrap themselves as they lay literally strewing the floor, so that there was hardly room to pass between them.  Here in their hour of sickness and suffering lay those whose health and strength had given way under unrequited labour—­some of them, no later than the previous day, had been urged with the lash to their accustomed tasks—­and their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons were even at that hour sweating over the earth whose increase was to procure for others all the luxuries which health can enjoy, all the comforts which can alleviate sickness.  Here lay women expecting every hour the terror and agonies of child-birth, others who had just brought their doomed offspring into the world, others who were groaning over the anguish and bitter disappointment of miscarriages—­here lay some burning with fever, others chilled with cold and aching with rheumatism, upon the hard cold ground, the draughts and damp of the atmosphere increasing their sufferings, and dirt, noise, stench, and every aggravation of which sickness is capable combined in their condition.  There had been among them one or two cases of prolonged and terribly hard labour; and the method adopted by the ignorant old negress, who was the sole matron, midwife, nurse, physician, surgeon, and servant of the infirmary, to assist them in their extremity, was to tie a cloth tight round the throats of the agonised women, and by drawing it till she almost suffocated them she produced violent and spasmodic struggles, which she assured me she thought materially assisted the progress of the labour.