the purpose of getting a glimpse at the
condition of those to whom he was carrying some slight means of mere
temporary relief.

The clergyman, whose desolate habitation he was about to visit, had
passed about sixty winters, fifteen of which he had spent in that house,
and thirty in the parish. That is to say, he had been fifteen years
curate, and fifteen rector, without ever having been absent more than
a month or six weeks at a time; and even these absences occurred
but rarely. We remember him well, and with affection, as who of his
survivors that ever knew him does not? He was tall, that is, somewhat
above the middle height, and until pressed down by the general
affliction which fell upon his class and his family, he had been quite
erect in his person. He was now bent, however, as by a load of years,
and on his pale face lay the obvious traces of sorrow and suffering. But
this was not all; whilst Destitution of the severest kind had impressed
on that venerable countenance the melancholy exponent of her presence,
Religion had also blended with it that beautiful manifestation of her
unshaken trust in God; of patience, meekness, and a disposition to
receive at his hands the severest dispensations of life, with a spirit
of cheerful humility and resignation. Take a cursory glance at his face,
and there, no doubt, you saw at once that sorrow and suffering lay.
Look, however, a little longer; observe the benign serenity of that
clear and cloudless eye; mark the patient sweetness of that firm and
well-formed mouth, and the character of heroic tranquility that pervades
his whole person, and sanctifies his sorrows, until they fill the heart
of the spectator with reverence and sympathy, and his mind with a sense
of the dignity, not to say sublimity, which religion can bestow upon
human suffering, in which it may almost be said that the creature gains
a loving triumph over the Creator himself.

Every one knows that, in general, the clergy of Ireland, as a class,
lived from hand to mouth, and that the men who suffered most during
the period of which we write were those whose livings were of moderate
income. The favored individuals, who enjoyed the rich and larger
incumbencies, the calamity did not reach, or if it did, only in
a slighter degree, and with but comparatively little effect. The
cessation, therefore, of only one year's income to those who had no
other source of support on which to depend, was dreadful. In many
instanc