en in, and his jaws so distended that he could scarcely
articulate a word. His four little children were sitting upon the ground
by his feet, nestling together, and trying to hide their naked limbs
under their dripping rags. How these poor things could stand upon their
feet and walk, and walk five miles, as they had done, I could not
conceive. Their appearance, though common to thousands of the same age
in this region of the shadow of death, was indescribable. Their paleness
was not that of common sickness. There was no sallow tinge in it. They
did not look as if newly raised from the grave and to life before the
blood had begun to fill their veins anew; but as if they had just been
thawed out of the ice, in which they had been imbedded until their blood
had turned to water.

Leaving this battle field of life, I accompanied the Rev. Mr. F----, the
Catholic minister, into one of the hovel lanes of the town. We found in
every tenement we entered enough to sicken the stoutest heart. In one,
we found a shoe-maker who was at work before a hole in the mud wall of
his hut about as large as a small pane of glass. There were five in his
family, and he said, when he could get any work, he could earn about
three shillings a week. In another cabin we discovered a nailer by the
dull light of his fire, working in a space not three feet square. He,
too, had a large family, half of whom were down with the fever, and he
could earn but two shillings a week. About the middle of this filthy
lane, we came to the ruins of a hovel, which had fallen down during the
night, and killed a man, who had taken shelter in it with his wife and
child. He had come in from the country, and ready to perish with cold
and hunger, had entered this falling house of clay. He was warned of
his danger, but answered that die he must, unless he found a shelter
before morning. He had kindled a small fire with some straw and bits of
turf, and was crouching over it, when the whole roof or gable end of
earth and stones came down upon him and his child, and crushed him to
death over the slow fire. The child had been pulled out alive, and
carried to the workhouse, but the father was still lying upon the dung
heap of the fallen roof, slightly covered with a piece of canvass. On
lifting this, a humiliating spectacle presented itself. What rags the
poor man had upon him when buried beneath the falling roof, were mostly
torn from his body in the last faint struggle for life.