! he knew not at the time how deeply the unfortunate family in
question were steeped in distress and poverty. They accepted this
miserable cabin; but in spite of every effort to improve their
condition, days, weeks, and months passed, and still found them unable
to make a change for the better.

When Darby and Sarah entered, they found young Con, who had now
relapsed, lying in one corner of the cabin, on a wretched shake-down bed
of damp straw; while on another of the same description lay his amiable
and affectionate sister Nancy. The cabin stood, as we have said, in a
low, moist situation, the floor of it being actually lower--which is a
common case--than the ground about it outside. It served, therefore,
as a receptacle for the damp and under-water which the incessant
down-pouring of rain during the whole season had occasioned. It was
therefore, dangerous to tread upon the floor, it was so soft and
slippery. The rain, which fell heavily, now came down through the roof
in so many places that they were forced to put under it such vessels as
they could spare, not even excepting the beds over each of which were
placed old clothes, doubled up under dishes, pots, and little bowls,
in order, if possible, to keep them dry. The house--if such it could
be called--was almost destitute of furniture, nothing but a few pots,
dishes, wooden noggins, some spoons, and some stools being their
principal furniture, with the exception of one standing short-posted
bed, in a corner, near the fire. There, then, in that low, damp, dark,
pestilential kraal, without chimney or window, sat the old man, who,
notwithstanding its squalid misery, could have looked upon it as a
palace, had he been able to say to his own heart--I am not a murderer.

There, we say, he sat alone, surrounded by pestilence and famine in
their most fearful shapes, listening to the moanings of his sick family,
and the ceaseless dropping of the rain, which fell into the vessels that
were placed to receive it. Mrs. Dalton was "out," a term which was used
in the bitter misery of the period, to indicate that the person to whom
it applied had been driven to the last resource of mendicancy; and his
other daughter, Mary, had gone to a neighbor's house to beg a little
fire.

As the old man uttered the words, no language could describe the misery
which was depicted on his countenance.

"Take me," he exclaimed; "ah, no; for then what will become of these?"
pointing to his son and