When he called for anything, the usual observation was, “Husht! the crathur’s callin’.  I must take the shovel an’ see what he wants.”

There were times, it is true, when the mirth of the poor fellows was’ very low, for hunger was generally among themselves; there were times when their own little shed presented a touching and melancholy spectacle—­perhaps we ought also to add, a noble one; for, to contemplate a number of men, considered rude and semi-barbarous, devoting themselves, in the midst of privations the most cutting and oppressive, to the care and preservation of a strange lad, merely because they knew him to be without friends and protection, is to witness a display of virtue truly magnanimous.  The food on which some of the persons were occasionally compelled to live, was blood boiled up with a little oatmeal; for when a season of famine occurs in Ireland, the people usually bleed the cows and bullocks to preserve themselves from actual starvation.  It is truly a sight of appalling misery to behold feeble women gliding across the country, carrying their cans and pitchers, actually trampling upon fertility, and fatness, and collected in the corner of some grazier’s farm waiting, gaunt and ravenous as Ghouls, for their portion of blood.  During these melancholy periods of want, everything in the shape of an esculent disappears.  The miserable creatures will pick up chicken-weed, nettles, sorrell, bug-loss, preshagh, and sea-weed, which they will boil and eat with the voracity of persons writhing under the united agonies of hunger and death!  Yet the very country thus groaning under such a terrible sweep of famine is actually pouring from all her ports a profusion of food, day after day; flinging it from her fertile bosom, with the wanton excess of a prodigal oppressed by abundance.

Despite, however, of all the poor scholar’s nurse-guard suffered, he was attended with a fidelity of care and sympathy which no calamity could shake.  Nor was this care fruitless; after the fever had passed through its usual stages he began to recover.  In fact, it has been observed very truly, that scarcely any person has been known to die under circumstances similar to those of the poor scholar.  These sheds, the erection of which is not unfrequent in case of fever, have the advantage of pure free air, by which the patient is cooled and refreshed.  Be the cause of it what it may, the fact has been established, and we feel satisfaction in being able to adduce our humble hero as an additional proof of the many recoveries which take place in situations apparently so unfavorable to human life.  But how is it possible to detail what M’Evoy suffered during this fortnight of intense agony?  Not those who can command the luxuries of life—­not those who can reach its comforts—­nor those who can supply themselves with its bare necessaries—­neither the cotter who struggles to support his wife and helpless children—­the mendicant who begs from door to door—­nor