Captain Caffin wrote to a friend an account of his visit to Skull, and his letter was published in many of the public journals.  “In the village of Skull,” he says, “three-fourths of the inhabitants you meet carry the tale of woe in their features and persons, as they are reduced to mere skeletons, the men in particular, all their physical power wasted away; they have all become beggars.  Having a great desire to see with my own eyes some of the misery which was said to exist, Dr. Traill, the rector of Skull, offered to drive me to a portion of his parish.  I found there was no need to take me beyond the village, to show me the horrors of famine in its worst features.  I had read in the papers letters and accounts of this state of things, but I thought they must be highly coloured to attract sympathy; but I there saw the reality of the whole—­no exaggeration, for it does not admit of it—­famine exists to a fearful degree, with all its horrors.  Fever has sprung up consequent upon the wretchedness; and swellings of limbs and body, and diarrhoea, from the want of nourishment, are everywhere to be found.”  Again:  “In no house that I entered was there not to be found the dead or dying; in particularizing two or three they may be taken as the picture of the whole—­there was no picking or choosing, but we took them just as they came.”  A cabin which he entered had, he says, the appearance of wretchedness without, but its interior was misery.  The Rev. Mr. Hall, on putting his head inside the hole which answered for a door, said:  “Well, Phillis, how is your mother to-day?” Phillis answered, “O Sir, is it you?  Mother is dead.”  Captain Caffin adds—­“And there—­fearful reality—­was the daughter, a skeleton herself, crouched and crying over the lifeless body of her mother, which was on the floor, cramped up as she had died, with her rags and her cloak about her, by the side of a few embers of peat.”  They came to the cabin of a poor old woman, the door of which was stopped up with dung.  She roused up, evidently astonished.  They had taken her by surprise.  She burst into tears, and said she had not been able to sleep since the corpse of the woman had lain in her bed.  The circumstance which destroyed her rest happened in this way:—­Some short time before, a poor miserable woman entered the cabin, and asked leave to rest herself for a few moments.  She got permission to do so.  She lay down, but never rose again.  She died in an hour, and in this miserable hovel of six feet square, the body remained four days before the wretched occupant could get any person to remove it.  It is not much to be wondered at that she had lost her rest.