he daughter could serve to
her sick mother. But the last cabin we visited in this painful walk,
presented to our eyes a lower deep of misery. It was the residence of
two families, both of which had been thinned down to half their original
number by the sickness. The first sight that met my eyes, on entering,
was the body of a dead woman, extended on one side of the fire-place. On
the other, an old man was lying on some straw, so far gone as to be
unable to articulate distinctly. He might have been ninety or fifty
years of age. It was difficult to determine, for this wasting
consumption of want brings out the extremest indices of old age in the
features of even the young.

But there was another apparition which sickened all the flesh and blood
in my nature. It has haunted me during the past night, like Banquo's
ghost. I have lain awake for hours, struggling for some graphic and
truthful similes or new elements of description, by which I might convey
to the distant reader some tangible image of this object. A dropsical
affection among the young and old is very common to all the sufferers by
famine. I had seen men at work on the public roads with their limbs
swollen almost to twice their usual size. But when the woman of this
cabin lifted from the straw, from behind the dying man, a boy about
twelve years of age, and held him up before us upon his feet, the most
horrifying spectacle met our eyes. The cold, watery-faced child was
entirely naked in front, from his neck down to his feet. His body was
swollen to nearly three times its usual size, and had burst the ragged
garment that covered him, and now dangled in shreds behind him. The
woman of the other family, who was sitting at her end of the hovel,
brought forward her little infant, a thin-faced baby of two years, with
clear, sharp eyes that did not wink, but stared stock still at vacancy,
as if a glimpse of another existence had eclipsed its vision. Its cold,
naked arms were not much larger than pipe stems, while its body was
swollen to the size of a full-grown person. Let the reader group these
apparitions of death and disease into the spectacle of ten feet square,
and then multiply it into three-fourths of the hovels in this region of
Ireland, and he will arrive at a fair estimate of the extent or degree
of its misery. Were it not for giving them pain, I should have been glad
if the well-dressed children in America could have entered these hovels
with us, and looked u