It is not our business, any more than it is our inclination, to dwell here upon the state of those sumptuary enactments, which reflected such honor upon the legislative wisdom, that permitted our country to arrive at the lamentable condition we have attempted to describe.  We merely mention the facts, and leave to those who possess position and ability, the task of giving to this extraordinary state of things a more effectual attention.  Without the least disposition, however, to defend or justify any violation of the laws, we may be permitted to observe, that the very witnessing of such facts as these, by destitute and starving multitudes, was in itself such a temptation to break in upon the provisions thus transmitted, as it was scarcely within the strength of men, furious with famine, to resist.  Be this as it may, however, it is our duty as a faithful historian to state, that at the present period of our narrative, the famine riots had begun to assume something of an alarming aspect.  Several carts had been attacked and pillaged, some strong farmers had been visited, and two or three misers were obliged to become benevolent with rather a bad grace.  At the head of these parties were two persons mentioned in these pages; to wit, Thomas Dalton and Red Eody Duncan, together with several others of various estimation and character; some of them, as might be naturally expected, the most daring and turbulent spirits in the neighborhood.

Such, then, was the miserable state of things in the country at that particular period.  The dreadful typhus was now abroad in all his deadly power, accompanied, on this occasion, as he always is among the Irish, by a panic which invested him with tenfold terrors.  The moment fever was ascertained, or even supposed to visit a family, that moment the infected persons were avoided by their neighbors and friends, as if they carried death, as they often did, about them; so that its presence occasioned all the usual interchanges of civility and good neighborhood to be discontinued.  Nor should this excite our wonder, inasmuch as this terrific scourge, though unquestionably an epidemic, was also ascertained to be dangerously and fatally contagious.  None, then, but persons of extraordinary moral strength, or possessing powerful impressions of religious duty, had courage to enter the houses of the sick or dead, for the purpose of rendering to the afflicted those offices of humanity which their circumstances required; if we except only their nearest relatives, or those who lived in the same family.

Having thus endeavored to give what we feel to be but a faint picture of the state of the kingdom at large in this memorable year, we beg our readers to accompany us once more to the cabin of our moody and mysterious friend, the Black Prophet.