the time.  Food of any description has not been under that roof for more than twenty-four hours.  They are all in bed but one.  A low murmur, that went to the heart of that one, with a noise which seemed to it louder and more terrible than the deepest peal that ever thundered through the firmament of heaven—­a low murmur, we say, of this description, arose from the beds, composed of those wailing sounds that mingle together as they proceed from the lips of weakness, pain, and famine, until they form that many-toned, incessant, and horrible voice of multiplied misery, which falls upon the ear with the echoes of the grave, and upon the heart as something wonderful in the accents of God, or, as we may suppose the voice of the accusing angel to be, whilst recording before His throne the official inhumanity of councils and senates, who harden their hearts and shut their ears to “the cry of the poor.”

Seated upon a second little stool was a man of huge stature, clothed, if we can say I so, with rags, contemplating the misery around him, and having no sounds to listen to but the low, ceaseless wail of pain and suffering which we have described.  His features, once manly and handsome, are now sharp and hollow; his beard is grown; his lips are white; and his eyes without I speculation, unless when lit up into an occasional blaze of fire, that seemed to proceed as much from the paroxysms of approaching insanity as from the terrible scene which surrounds him, as well as from his own I wolfish desire for food.  His cheek bones project fearfully, and his large temples seem, by the ghastly skin which is drawn tight about them, to remind one of those of a skeleton, were it not that the image is made still more appalling by the existence of life.  Whilst in this position, motionless as a statue, a voice from one of the beds called out “Jemmy,” with a tone so low and feeble that to other ears it would probably not have been distinctly audible.  He went to the bedside, and taking the candle in his hand, said, in a voice that had lost its strength but not its tenderness: 

“Well, Mary dear?”

“Jemmy,” said she, for it was his wife who had called him, “my time has come.  I must lave you and them at last.”

“Thanks be to the Almighty,” he exclaimed, fervently; “and don’t be surprised, darlin’ of my life, that I spake as I do.  Ah, Mary dear,” he proceeded, with, a wild and bitter manner, “I never thought that my love for you would make me say such words, or wish to feel you torn out of my breakin’ heart; but I know how happy the change will be for you, as well as the sufferers you are lavin’ behind you.  Death now is our only consolation.”