side, one of which, the most dilapidated and
smallest of the number, the minister entered, to visit a poor old woman,
who had been bed-ridden for ten years. Scarce ever before had I seen so
miserable a hovel. It was hardly larger than the cabin of the Betsey,
and a thousand times less comfortable. The walls and roof, formed of
damp grass-grown turf, with a few layers of unconnected stone in the
basement tiers, seemed to constitute one continuous hillock, sloping
upwards from foundation to ridge, like one of the lesser moraines of
Agassiz, save where the fabric here and there bellied outwards or
inwards, in perilous dilapidation, that seemed but awaiting the first
breeze. The low chinky door opened direct into the one wretched
apartment of the hovel, which we found lighted chiefly by holes in the
roof. The back of the sick woman's bed was so placed at the edge of the
opening, that it had formed at one time a sort of partition to the
portion of the apartment, some five or six feet square, which contained
the fire-place; but the boarding that had rendered it such had long
since fallen away, and it now presented merely a naked rickety frame to
the current of cold air from without. Within a foot of the bed-ridden
woman's head there was a hole in the turf-wall, which was, we saw,
usually stuffed with a bundle of rags, but which lay open as we entered,
and which furnished a downward peep of sea and shore, and the rocky
_Eilan Chasteil_, with the minister's yacht riding in the channel hard
by. The little hole in the wall had formed the poor creature's only
communication with the face of the external world for ten weary years.
She lay under a dingy coverlet, which, whatever its original hue, had
come to differ nothing in color from the graveyard earth, which must so
soon better supply its place. What perhaps first struck the eye was the
strange flatness of the bed-clothes, considering that a human body lay
below: there seemed scarce bulk enough under them for a human skeleton.
The light of the opening fell on the corpse-like features of the
woman,--sallow, sharp, bearing at once the stamp of disease and of
famine; and yet it was evident, notwithstanding, that they had once been
agreeable,--not unlike those of her daughter, a good-looking girl of
eighteen, who, when we entered, was sitting beside the fire. Neither
mother nor daughter had any English; but it was not difficult to
determine, from the welcome with which the minister wa