Even the children were little living skeletons, wan and yellow, with a spirit of pain and suffering legible upon their fleshless but innocent features—­while the very dogs, as was well observed, were not able to bark, unless they stood against a wall; for indeed, such of them as survived, were nothing but ribs and skin.  At all events, they assisted in making up the terrible picture of general misery which the country at large presented.  Both day and night, but at night especially, their hungry howlings could be heard over the country, or mingling with wailings which the people were in the habit of pouring over those whom the terrible typhus was sweeping away with such wide and indiscriminate fatality.

Our readers may now perceive, that the sufferings of these unhappy crowds, before they had been driven to these acts of violence, were almost beyond belief.  At an early period of the season, when the potatoes could not be dug, miserable women might be seen early in the morning, and in fact, during all hours of the day, gathering weeds of various descriptions, in order to sustain life; and happy were they who could procure a few handfuls of young nettles, chicken-weed, sorrel, preshagh, buglass, or seaweed, to bring home as food, either for themselves or their unfortunate children.  Others, again, were glad to creep or totter to stock-farms, at great distances across the country, in hope of being able to procure a portion of blood, which, on such melancholy occasions, is taken from the heifers and bullocks that graze there, in order to prevent the miserable poor from perishing by actual starvation and death.

Alas! little do our English neighbors know or dream of the horrors which attend a year of severe famine in this unhappy country.  The crowds which kept perpetual and incessant siege to the houses of wealthy and even of struggling small farmers, were such! as scarcely any pen could describe.  Neither can we render anything like adequate justice to the benevolence and charity—­nay, we ought to say, the generosity and magnanimity of this and the middle classes in general, In no country on earth could such noble instances of self-denial and sublime humanity be witnessed.  It has happened in thousands of instances that the last miserable morsel, the last mouthful of nourishing liquid, the last potato, or the last six-pence, has been divided with wretched and desolate beings who required it more, and this, too, by persons who, when that was gone, knew not to what quarter they could turn with a hope of replacing for themselves that which they had just shared in a spirit of such genuine and exalted piety.*