Father Hanratty was a firm minded man, with a somewhat rough manner, but a heart natural and warm.  After looking upon her face for a few moments, he clasped, his hands closely together, and turning up his eyes to Heaven, he exclaimed: 

“Great God, guide and support me in this trying scene!”

And, indeed, it is not to be wondered at that he uttered such an exclamation.  There lay in the woman’s eyes—­between her knit and painful eye-brows, over her shrunk upper forehead, upon her sharp cheek-bones, and along the ridge of her thin, wasted nose—­there lay upon her skeleton arms, pointed elbows, and long-jointed fingers, a frightful expression, at once uniform and varied, that spoke of gaunt and yellow famine in all its most hideous horrors.  Her eyeballs protruded even to sharpness, and as she glared about her with a half conscious and half-instinctive look, there seemed a fierce demand in her eye that would have been painful, were it not that it was occasionally tamed down into something mournful and imploring, by a recollection of the helpless beings that were about her.  Stripped, as she then was, of all that civilized society presents to a human being on the bed of death—­without friends, aid of any kind, comfort, sympathy, or the consolations of religion—­she might be truly said to have sunk to the mere condition of animal life—­whose uncontrollable impulses had thus left their startling and savage impress upon her countenance, unless, as we have said, when the faint dawn of consciousness threw a softer and more human light into her wild features.

“In the name and in the spirit of God’s mercy,” asked the priest, “if you have the use of your tongue or voice, tell me what the matter is with you or your children?  Is it sickness or starvation?”

The sound of a human voice appeared to arrest her attention, and rouse her a little.  She paused, as it were, from her sufferings, and looked first at the priest, and then at his companion—­but she spoke not.  He then repeated the question, and after a little delay he saw that her lips moved.

“She is striving to speak,” said he, “but cannot.  I will stoop to her.”

He repeated the question a third time, and, stooping, so as to bring his ear near her mouth, he could catch, expressed very feebly and indistinctly, the word—­hunger.  She then made an effort, and bent down her mouth to the infant which now lay still at her breast.  She felt for its little heart, she felt its little lips—­but they were now chill and motionless; its little hands ceased to gather any longer around her breast; it was cold—­it was breathless—­it was dead!  Her countenance now underwent a singular and touching change—­a kind of solemn joy—­a sorrowful serenity was diffused over it.  She seemed to remember their position, and was in the act, after having raised her eyes to heaven, of putting round her hand to feel for the boy who lay on the other side, when she was seized with a short and rather feeble spasm, and laying down her head in its original position between her children, she was at last freed from life and all the sufferings which its gloomy lot had inflicted upon her and those whom she loved.