s had begun to assume something of
an alarming aspect. Several carts had been attacked and pillaged, some
strong farmers had been visited, and two or three misers were obliged to
become benevolent with rather a bad grace. At the head of these parties
were two persons mentioned in these pages; to wit, Thomas Dalton and
Red Eody Duncan, together with several others of various estimation and
character; some of them, as might be naturally expected, the most daring
and turbulent spirits in the neighborhood.

Such, then, was the miserable state of things in the country at that
particular period. The dreadful typhus was now abroad in all his deadly
power, accompanied, on this occasion, as he always is among the Irish,
by a panic which invested him with tenfold terrors. The moment fever
was ascertained, or even supposed to visit a family, that moment the
infected persons were avoided by their neighbors and friends, as if
they carried death, as they often did, about them; so that its presence
occasioned all the usual interchanges of civility and good neighborhood
to be discontinued. Nor should this excite our wonder, inasmuch as
this terrific scourge, though unquestionably an epidemic, was also
ascertained to be dangerously and fatally contagious. None, then,
but persons of extraordinary moral strength, or possessing powerful
impressions of religious duty, had courage to enter the houses of
the sick or dead, for the purpose of rendering to the afflicted those
offices of humanity which their circumstances required; if we except
only their nearest relatives, or those who lived in the same family.

Having thus endeavored to give what we feel to be but a faint picture
of the state of the kingdom at large in this memorable year, we beg
our readers to accompany us once more to the cabin of our moody and
mysterious friend, the Black Prophet.

Evening was now tolerably far advanced; Donnel Dhu sat gloomily, as
usual, looking into the fire, with no agreeable aspect; while on the
opposite side sat Nelly, as silent and nearly as gloomy-looking as
himself. Every now and then his black, piercing eye would stray over to
her, as if in a state of abstraction, and again with that undetermined
kind of significance which made it doubtful whether the subject-matter
of his cogitations was connected with her at all or not. In this
position were they placed when Sarah entered the cabin, and throwing
aside her cloak, seated herself in front of the fi