the coffin with the slide or hinged bottom, but such coffins had been, previously used in other places.  He relates a touching incident which occurred at Ballydehob, at the time of his visit.  Two children, the elder only six years, went into a neighbour’s house in search of food.  They were asked where their father was, and they replied that he was asleep for the last two days.  The people became alarmed, and went to his cabin, where they found him quite dead, and the merest skeleton.  The mother of those children had died some weeks before, and their poor devoted father sacrificed his life for them, as the neighbours found some Indian meal in the place, which he was evidently reserving for his infant children, whilst he suffered himself to die of starvation.

But a common effect of the Famine was to harden the hearts of the people, and blunt their natural feelings.  Hundreds, remarks this correspondent, are daily expiring in their cabins in the three parishes of this neighbourhood, and the people are becoming so accustomed to death that they have lost all those kindly sympathies for the relatives of the departed, which formerly characterized their natures.  Want and destitution have so changed them, that a sordid avarice, and a greediness of disposition to grasp at everything in the shape of food, has seized hold of the souls of those who were considered the most generous and hospitable race on the face of the earth.  As happened in other places, no persons attended the funerals; those who were still alive were so exhausted that they were unable to inter the dead, and the duty of doing so was frequently left to casual passers-by.

About the middle of February, Commander Caffin, of Her Majesty’s ship “Scourge,” visited Skull, in company with the rector, the Rev. Robert Traill Hall.  After having entered a few houses, the Commander said to the Revd. gentleman, “My pre-conceived ideas of your misery seem as a dream to me compared with the reality.”  And yet Captain Caffin had only time to see the cabins on the roadside, in which the famine was not so terrible as it was up among the hills and fastnesses, where, in one wretched hovel, whose two windows were stuffed with straw, the Rev. Mr. Hall found huddled together sixteen human beings.  They did not, however, belong to one family—­three wretched households were congregated into this miserable abode.  Out of the sixteen, two only could be said to be able to work; and on the exertions of those “two poor pallid objects” had the rest to depend.  Eight of the others were crowded into one pallet,—­it could not be called a bed, being formed of a little straw, which scarcely kept them from the cold mud floor.  A poor father was still able to sit up, but his legs were dreadfully swollen, and he was dead in two or three days after the Rev. Mr. Hall’s visit.  Beside him lay his sister, and at his feet two children—­all hastening to eternity.