ane of famine and pestilence, to nothing
of greater family resemblance, than that of the battle field, when the
hostile armies have retired, leaving one-third of their number bleeding
upon the ground. As soon as Dr. D---- appeared at the head of the lane,
it was filled with miserable beings, haggard, famine-stricken men,
women, and children, some far gone in the consumption of the famine
fever, and all imploring him "for the honour of God" to go in and see
"my mother," "my father," "my boy," "who is very bad, your honour." And
then, interspersed with these earnest entreaties, others louder still
would be raised for bread. In every hovel we entered, we found the dying
or the dead. In one of these straw-roofed burrows, eight persons had
died in the last fortnight, and five more were lying upon the fetid,
pestiferous straw, upon which their predecessors to the grave had been
consumed by the wasting fever of famine. In scarcely a single one of
these most inhuman habitations was there the slightest indication of
food of any kind to be found, nor fuel to cook food, nor any thing
resembling a bed, unless it were a thin layer of filthy straw in one
corner, upon which the sick person lay, partly covered with some ragged
garment. There being no window, nor aperture to admit the light, in
these wretched cabins, except the door, we found ourselves often in
almost total darkness for the first moment of our entrance. But a faint
glimmering of a handful of burning straw in one end would soon reveal to
us the indistinct images of wan-faced children grouped together, with
their large, plaintive, still eyes looking out at us, like the sick
young of wild beasts in their dens. Then the groans, and the choked,
incoherent entreaties for help of some man or woman wasting away with
the sickness in some corner of the cabin, would apprise us of the number
and condition of the family. The wife, mother, or child would frequently
light a wisp of straw, and hold it over the face of the sick person,
discovering to us the sooty features of some emaciated creature in the
last stage of the fever. In one of these places we found an old woman
stretched upon a pallet of straw, with her head within a foot of a
handful of fire, upon which something was steaming in a small iron
vessel. The Doctor removed the cover, and we found it was filled with a
kind of slimy sea-weed, which, I believe, is used for manure in the
sea-board. This was all the nourishment that t