“God help us,” exclaimed Sullivan, “if we hadn’t betther and brighter consolation than the grave.  Only for the hopes in our Divine Redeemer an’ his mercy, it’s little consolation the grave could give us.  But indeed, Donnel, as you say, everything about us is enough to sink the heart within one—­an’ no hope at all of a change for the betther.  However, God is good, and, if it’s His will that we should suffer, it’s our duty to submit to it.”

The prophet looked around him with a gloomy aspect, and, truth to say, the appearance of everything on which the eye could rest, was such as gave unquestionable indications of wide-spread calamity to the country.

The evening, which was now far advanced, had impressed on it a character of such dark and hopeless desolation as weighed down the heart with a feeling of cold and chilling gloom that was communicated by the dreary aspect of every thing around.  The sky was obscured by a heavy canopy of low, dull clouds that had about them none of the grandeur of storm, but lay overhead charged with those wintry deluges which we feel to be so unnatural and alarming in autumn, whose bounty and beauty they equally disfigure and destroy.  The whole summer had been sunless and wet—­one, in fact, of ceaseless rain which fell, day after day, week after week, and month after month, until the sorrowful consciousness had arrived that any change for the better must now come too late, and that nothing was certain but the terrible union of famine, disease, and death which was to follow.  The season, owing to the causes specified, was necessarily late, and such of the crops as were, ripe had a sickly and unthriving look, that told of comparative failure, while most of the fields which, in our autumns, would have been ripe and yellow, were now covered with a thin, backward crop, so unnaturally green that all hope of maturity was out of the question.  Low meadows were in a state of inundation, and on alluvial soils the ravages of the floods Were visible in layers of mud and gravel that were deposited over many of the prostrate corn fields.  The peat turf lay in oozy and neglected heaps, for there had not been sun enough to dry it sufficiently for use, so that the poor had want of fuel, and cold to feel, as well as want of food itself.  Indeed, the appearance of the country, in consequence of this wetness in the firing, was singularly dreary and depressing.  Owing to the difficulty with which it burned, or rather wasted away, without light or heat, the eye, in addition to the sombre hue which the absence of the sun cast over all things, was forced to dwell upon the long black masses of smoke which trailed slowly over the whole country, or hung, during the thick sweltering calms, in broad columns that gave to the face of nature an aspect strikingly dark and disastrous, when associated, as it was, with the destitution and suffering of the great body of the people.  The general appearance of the crops was indeed deplorable.