that in such matters there
is no such thing as mercy--no special mercies--no other mercy than
that fatherly, forbearing, all-seeing, perfect goodness by which the
Creator is ever adapting this world to the wants of His creatures,
and rectifying the evils arising from their faults and follies? _Sed
quo Musa tendis?_ Such discourses of the gods as these are not to be
fitly handled in such small measures.

At any rate, there was the famine, undoubted now by any one; and
death, who in visiting Castle Richmond may be said to have knocked at
the towers of a king, was busy enough also among the cabins of the
poor. And now the great fault of those who were the most affected was
becoming one which would not have been at first sight expected. One
would think that starving men would become violent, taking food by
open theft--feeling, and perhaps not without some truth, that the
agony of their want robbed such robberies of its sin. But such was by
no means the case. I only remember one instance in which the bakers'
shops were attacked; and in that instance the work was done by those
who were undergoing no real suffering. At Clonmel, in Tipperary,
the bread was one morning stripped away from the bakers' shops; but
at that time, and in that place, there was nothing approaching to
famine. The fault of the people was apathy. It was the feeling of the
multitude that the world and all that was good in it was passing away
from them; that exertion was useless, and hope hopeless. "Ah, me!
your honour," said a man to me, "there'll never be a bit and a sup
again in the county Cork! The life of the world is fairly gone!"

And it was very hard to repress this feeling. The energy of a man
depends so much on the outward circumstances that encumber him! It is
so hard to work when work seems hopeless--so hard to trust where the
basis of our faith is so far removed from sight! When large tracts
of land went out of cultivation, was it not natural to think that
agriculture was receding from the country, leaving the green hills
once more to be brown and barren, as hills once green have become in
other countries? And when men were falling in the highways, and women
would sit with their babes in their arms, listless till death should
come to them, was it not natural to think that death was making a
huge success--that he, the inexorable one, was now the inexorable
indeed?

There were greatly trusting hearts that could withstand the weight of
this terr