le descriptions, under which they tottered and panted,
and sometimes fell utterly prostrate from recent illness or the mere
exhaustion of want. Aged people, grey-haired old men, and old women bent
with age, exhibited a wild and excited alacrity that was grievous to
witness, while hurrying homewards--if they had a home, or if not, to the
first friendly shelter they could get--a kind of dim exulting joy feebly
blazing in their heavy eyes, and a wild sense of unexpected good
fortune working in unnatural play upon the muscles of their wrinkled and
miserable faces. The ghastly impressions of famine, however, were not
confined to those who composed the crowds. Even the children were little
living skeletons, wan and yellow, with a spirit of pain and suffering
legible upon their fleshless but innocent features--while the very dogs,
as was well observed, were not able to bark, unless they stood against
a wall; for indeed, such of them as survived, were nothing but ribs and
skin. At all events, they assisted in making up the terrible picture of
general misery which the country at large presented. Both day and night,
but at night especially, their hungry howlings could be heard over the
country, or mingling with wailings which the people were in the habit of
pouring over those whom the terrible typhus was sweeping away with such
wide and indiscriminate fatality.

Our readers may now perceive, that the sufferings of these unhappy
crowds, before they had been driven to these acts of violence, were
almost beyond belief. At an early period of the season, when the
potatoes could not be dug, miserable women might be seen early in the
morning, and in fact, during all hours of the day, gathering weeds of
various descriptions, in order to sustain life; and happy were they who
could procure a few handfuls of young nettles, chicken-weed, sorrel,
preshagh, buglass, or seaweed, to bring home as food, either for
themselves or their unfortunate children. Others, again, were glad to
creep or totter to stock-farms, at great distances across the country,
in hope of being able to procure a portion of blood, which, on such
melancholy occasions, is taken from the heifers and bullocks that graze
there, in order to prevent the miserable poor from perishing by actual
starvation and death.

Alas! little do our English neighbors know or dream of the horrors which
attend a year of severe famine in this unhappy country. The crowds which
kept perpetual and i