A Week In Ireland: Leaves From The Editor's Journal

Skibbereen, Fcb. 20. RèV. Mr. Fitzpalrick called, with seve. ral gentlemen of the town, and n their company I took my first walk through the potter's field of dcstitution nnddeath. As soon as we opened the door, a crowd ■of hnggnrd creatures pressed upon us, .and with agonizing prayers íbr bread, foliowed us to the soup kitchon. One womarM whosd entreaties became rresistnbly importúnate, had wotched all night in the grave yard, lest the body of her husband hould be stolen from his last resting place, tO which ho had been constgned yesterday. Sho had left five children ick with the famine fcver in her hovel, nnd she raised an exceeding bitter cry for help. A man with swollen feet pressod closély upon-us, and begged for bread lost piteomsly. H had pawned his shoes forfuod, which :be had already consumed. The soup kitchen was surrounoed by a cloud of thoso famine spectres, half naked nnd standing or sitting in the mud, beTieatha cold drizzling rain. The narrow de file to the 3spensjiry bar was chokcd with old and young of sexes, struggling forward with their rusty tin and ironvessels for soup ; somt of them upon all fours üke famished beasts. There wasacheap bread dispensary opened in one end of building; nnd the principal pressure was nt the door of this. Amorig the attenuated appantionsof humanitv that thronged ihis gateof stinied charity, one poor man prosenled himself undcr circumstances that even distinguished his case from the rest. He lived several miles from the centre of the town, in one of the rural districts, whore he found himself on the eve of perishing with his famiJyof seven mail children. Lf was worth the last struggle of na'ure, and the miserable skeleton of a father, had fastened his youngest child to his back ; nd with four more by his side, had staggered up to the door, just aa we entered the bre-ui department of the establishment. The hair upon his face was ncarly as long as that upon his hoad. His cheeks were fallen in, nnd his jaws so distended thnt he could scarcely articúlate a word. His four little children were sitting upon the ground by his feet, nestling togelher, and trying to hide their nnked limbs under their dripping rags. Mow these poor things could stand on thoir feet and walk, nnd walk five miles as they had done, I could not conceive. Their appearance, though common to thousar.ds in this región of tlieshadow o death, was indescribable. Their paleness was not that of common sickness. There was no sallow tingo in it. They did no look as if newly raised from the grave and to life before the blood had begu.n to fill their veins anew ; but os if they hac been thawed out of the ico, in which they had been imbedded until their blood hac turned to water. Leaving this battle-fieM of life, 1 ac companied Mr. Fitzpatrick, the Catholic minister, into one of the hovel lañes o Ihe town. We found in every tenemen we entered enough to sicken the stoutes heart. In ono we found' a shoemaker who was at work before a hole in the mud woll of his hut, about as large as a small pane of glass. There were five in the family, and he said when he could get any work he could oarn about lhree ehillings a week. In another cabin we discovered a nailer by the small light of his fire, worklng in aspace notthree 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 lano we carne to the ruin of a hovel which had fallen during the night and killed aman who had taken shelter in it with his wife and child. He h&d come in from the country ; and, ready to perisn with cold and hunger, had entered this falling house ofclay. He was warned of his danger, but answered that die he must unless he fonnd a shelter before morning. He hadkindled a small fire with some straw anc )y bits of turf, and was crouching over it, when the whole roof and gable end ol earth and stones came down upon him and bis child, and crushed him to denth over theslow fire. The chlid had been pulled ouf alive, and carriedtothe workhouse ; in but the father was still lying there upon the dung heap of the fallen roof, sliglitly covered with a piece of canvass. On lifting this, a humiliating spectacle presented itself. Whnt 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: his 'y neck and shoulder and right arm were , burnt to a einder. There he lay in the 18 ruin, like the carease of a brute beast T thrown upon the dunghill. As we con tinued our walk along this filthy lane, half naked women and children would come . out of their cabins, apparently in the last stage of the fever, to beg for food "for the honor of God." As they stood upon the wet ground, we could almost see it smoke beneath their bare feet, burning . with the feer. We entered the grave. yard, in the midst of which was a small watch-house. This miserable shed had served as a grave where the dying could bury themselves. It was seven feet long and six in breadth. It was already wall ed round on the outside with an embankrnent of graves half way to the eaves. - The aperture of this horrible den of death would scarcely admit the entrance of a common sized person. And into this noisome spulchre living men, women, and children went down to die ; to pillow upon thé rotten atraw, the grave clotlies vacated by preceding victima, and festering wilh their fevev. Here they Iy Oc closely to each other as if crowded side by side on the bottom of one grave. Six persons hnd been found in this fetid sepulchre at one time, and with one only able to crawl to the door and to ask for water. Removing a board from the entrance of this black hole of pestilence, we found k crammed with wan victimsof fnmine, ready and willing to perish. A quiet, listless despair broods over the population, and crudles men for the grave. Returned from this painful walk, nearly wet through and sad at the thought that I could not administer any relief to my perishing fellow beings. Spent this evening in writing letters to Englond. Sktbberecn, Feb. 21. ] Dr. Donovan called at 2 P. M. and we proceeded together to visit a lañe of hovels on the opposite side of the village. - The wretchedness of this linio mud-city of the dcaH and dying was of a deeper stamp than the one I saw yesterday. - l Mere human beings and their clayey y itations seemed to be meltingc down l I getlier into the earth. 1 can find no langunge nor illustration sufficiently impressive to portray the speclacle to an American reader. A cold drizzling rain was deepening the pools of black fillh, ' into which it feil like ink-drops from the ' clouds. Few of the young or old have ' not read of the scène exhibited on the field of batile after the action. when visited by the surgeon. The cries of the wounded nnd dying for help, have been described my many graphic pens. The agonizingenlreaty for "Water! water!! help! help!!" has been coriveyed to our minds with painful distinctness. I can liken the scène we witnessed in this low ' lane 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 ns Dr. Donovan appeared at the head of the lane, it was filled wilh miserable beings, haggard, famine-stricken men, women and children, some far gone in the consumption of the faminc fever, and all imploring him " for the honor of God " to go in and see " my mother," " my father," " my wile, " " my boy," j, "who is very bad your honor." And then ., interspersed with these earnest entreatics, . others louder still would be raised for brend. In every hovel we entered we c found the dying or the dead. In one of Q these straw-roofed buvrows eight persons c had died in the lnst fortnight, and five more were lying upon the fetid, ous straw, upon which their predecessors to the grave had been consumed by the p( wasting fever of famine. In scarcely a single one of these most inhuman n tions was there the slightest ndiealion of fuod of any kind to be found, nor fuel y to cook food, nor anything resembling a y( bed, unless it was a thin layer of filthy j straw in one corner, upon which the sick oj )erson lay, partly covered with some ff ngged garment. There being no c dow, nor apenure to admit the light, in w hese wretched cabins, except the door, st we found ourselves often in clmost total n iarkness for the first moment of our t ranee. But a faint glimmering of a t ui of burning straw in one end would oon reveal to us the indistinct images of arí wan-faced children grouped together, vr , their large, plaintive, still eyes, lookir f out at US, like the sick young of w i beasts in their dens. Tfien the groan r and the choaked, incoherent entreatii ] for help of come man or woman wastin ; away with the sickncss, in some corm i of the cabin, would apprise us of the nun ■ berand condition of the family. Th i wife, mother, or child, would frequentl light a wisp of straw, and hold over th i face of the sick person, discovering to u the sooty features of some emaeiate : crealure in the last stage of the fever.i ín one of these places we found an ol woman strelched upon a pallet of strav with her head wiiliin n foot of a handfu of fire, upon which something was steam ing in asmalliron vessel. The Docto removed the cover, and we found it wa filled with a kind of slimy seaweed, whicl l believo is used for manure on the sea board. This was all ihe nourishmen that the daughter could serve to hersicl mother. But the last cabin we visited u this painful walk, presented to our eye a lower deep of misery. It was the res idence of two families, both of which hac been thinned down to half their origina number by the sickness. The first sigh ihat met my eyes on entering was the body of a dead woman, extended on the side of the fireplace. On the otiier nr old man was lying on some straw, so fai gone as to be unable to articulate distinct ly. He might have been ninety, or fifty years of agp. It was difficult to determine ; for this wastmg consumption oi want brings out the extremest indices o! old.age in the features of even the young. But there was another apparition which dekened all the flesh and blood of my naiure. It has hflunted me during the past night, like Banquo's ghost. I have lain awake for hours, strupgling for some graphic and truthful símiles ornew'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 haveseen men at werk on the public roads with their limbs swollen almost to twice their usual size. But when the woman of tl. is cabin lifted from the straw, from behind the dying man, a boy twelve years of age, and held him up before us upon his feet, the most horrifying spectacle met our eyes. The cold, wateryfaced 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 has burst the rogged garment that covered him, and which now dangled in shreds behind him. The woman of the other family, who has sitting at her end of the hovel, brought forward her little infnnt, 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 uf another exisience had eclipsed its visión. lts cold, naked arms were not much larger than pipe sterns, while its body was swollen to the size of a f uil grown person. Let the reaier gioup these apparitionc of denth und disease nto the spectacle of ten feet square, and then multiply it into threefourths of the hovels in this región of [reland ; and he will arrive at a fair eslimate of the extenl and degreo of its misery. Were it not for giving them pain, I should have been glad if the well]re,ssed children in America could have jntered these hovels with us, and looked jpon the young creatures wasting away jnmurmuringly, by slow, consuming desitution, I am sure they would have been :ouched to the liveliest compassion at the pectacle, and have been ready to divide