ts front! The doorway,
all insufficient as it is, takes nearly the whole facing to the
street. The roof, looking as if it were only the dirty eaves hanging
from its more aspiring neighbour on the right, supports itself
against the cabin on the left, about three feet above the ground.
Can that be the habitation of any of the human race? Few but such as
those whose lot has fallen on such barren places would venture in;
but for a moment let us see what is there.

But the dark misery within hides itself in thick obscurity. The
unaccustomed eye is at first unable to distinguish any object, and
only feels the painful effect of the confined smoke; but when, at
length, a faint, struggling light makes its way through the entrance,
how wretched is all around!

A sickly woman, the entangled nature of whose insufficient garments
would defy description, is sitting on a low stool before the fire,
suckling a miserably dirty infant; a boy, whose only covering is a
tattered shirt, is putting fresh, but, alas, damp turf beneath the
pot in which are put to boil the potatoes--their only food. Two or
three dim children--their number is lost in their obscurity--are
cowering round the dull, dark fire, atop of one another; and on a
miserable pallet beyond--a few rotten boards, propped upon equally
infirm supports, and covered over with only one thin black quilt--is
sitting the master of the mansion; his grizzly, unshorn beard, his
lantern jaws and shaggy hair, are such as his home and family would
lead one to expect. And now you have counted all that this man
possesses; other furniture has he none--neither table nor chair,
except that low stool on which his wife is sitting. Squatting on
the ground--from off the ground, like pigs, only much more poorly
fed--his children eat the scanty earnings of his continual labour.

And yet for this abode the man pays rent.

The miserable appearance of Irish peasants, when in the very lowest
poverty, strikes one more forcibly in the towns than in the open
country. The dirt and filth around them seems so much more oppressive
on them; they have no escape from it. There is much also in ideas
and associations. On a road-side, or on the borders of a bog, the
dusty colour of the cabin walls, the potato patch around it, the
green scraughs or damp brown straw which form its roof, all the
appurtenances, in fact, of the cabin, seem suited to the things
around it. But in a town this is not so. It evidently should