It is impossible for us here to detail the subject matter of his reflections, or to intimate to our readers how far his determination to bring Condy Dalton to justice originated in repentance for having concealed his knowledge of the murder, or in some other less justifiable state of feeling.  At this moment, indeed, the family of the Daltons wore in anything but a position to bear the heavy and terrible blow which was about to fail upon them.  Our readers cannot forget the pitiable state in which we left them, during that distressing crisis of misery, when the strange woman arrived with the oat-meal, which the kind-hearted Mave Sullivan had so generously sent them.  On that melancholy occasion her lover complained of being ill, and, unfortunately, the symptoms were, in this instance, too significant of the malady which followed them.  Indeed, it would be an infliction of unnecessary pain to detail here the sufferings which this unhappy family had individually and collectively borne.  Young Condy, after a fortnight’s prostration from typhus fever, was again upon his legs, tottering about, as his father had been, in a state of such helplessness between want of food on the one hand, and illness on the other, as it is distressing even to contemplate.  If, however, the abstract consideration of it, even at a distance, be a matter of such painful retrospect to the mind, what must not the actual endurance of that and worse have been to the thousands upon thousands of families who were obliged, by God’s mysterious dispensation, to encounter these calamities in all their almost incredible and hideous reality.

At this precise period, the state of the country was frightful beyond belief; for it is well known that the mortality of the season we are describing was considerably greater than that which even cholera occasioned in its worst and most malignant ravages.  Indeed, the latter was not attended by such a tedious and lingering train of miseries as that, which in so many woful shapes, surrounded typhus fever.  The appearance of cholera was sudden, and its operations quick, and although, on that account, it was looked upon with tenfold terror, yet for this very reason, the consequences which it produced were by no means so full of affliction and distress, nor presented such strong and pitiable claims on human aid and sympathy as did those of typhus.  In the one case, the victim was cut down by a sudden stroke, which occasioned a shock or moral paralysis both to himself and the survivors—­especially to the latter—­that might, be almost said to neutralize its own inflictions.  In the other, the approach was comparatively so slow and gradual, that all the sympathies and afflictions were allowed full and painful time to reach the utmost limits of human suffering, and to endure the wasting series of those struggles and details which long illness, surrounded by destitution and affliction, never fails to inflict.  In the cholera, there was no time