emplate a number of men, considered rude and semi-barbarous,
devoting themselves, in the midst of privations the most cutting and
oppressive, to the care and preservation of a strange lad, merely
because they knew him to be without friends and protection, is to
witness a display of virtue truly magnanimous. The food on which some
of the persons were occasionally compelled to live, was blood boiled up
with a little oatmeal; for when a season of famine occurs in Ireland,
the people usually bleed the cows and bullocks to preserve themselves
from actual starvation. It is truly a sight of appalling misery to
behold feeble women gliding across the country, carrying their cans and
pitchers, actually trampling upon fertility, and fatness, and collected
in the corner of some grazier's farm waiting, gaunt and ravenous as
Ghouls, for their portion of blood. During these melancholy periods of
want, everything in the shape of an esculent disappears. The miserable
creatures will pick up chicken-weed, nettles, sorrell, bug-loss,
preshagh, and sea-weed, which they will boil and eat with the voracity
of persons writhing under the united agonies of hunger and death! Yet
the very country thus groaning under such a terrible sweep of famine is
actually pouring from all her ports a profusion of food, day after day;
flinging it from her fertile bosom, with the wanton excess of a prodigal
oppressed by abundance.

Despite, however, of all the poor scholar's nurse-guard suffered, he was
attended with a fidelity of care and sympathy which no calamity could
shake. Nor was this care fruitless; after the fever had passed through
its usual stages he began to recover. In fact, it has been observed
very truly, that scarcely any person has been known to die under
circumstances similar to those of the poor scholar. These sheds, the
erection of which is not unfrequent in case of fever, have the advantage
of pure free air, by which the patient is cooled and refreshed. Be the
cause of it what it may, the fact has been established, and we feel
satisfaction in being able to adduce our humble hero as an additional
proof of the many recoveries which take place in situations apparently
so unfavorable to human life. But how is it possible to detail what
M'Evoy suffered during this fortnight of intense agony? Not those
who can command the luxuries of life--not those who can reach
its comforts--nor those who can supply themselves with its bare
necessaries--neither