CHAPTER V.
"However darkly stained by sin,
He is thy brother yet."
It was at the house of Mr. Savage, at the Sound, where I first met with the Hon. William Butler. He insisted on my going to Erris, as a spot of all others the most wretched, offering kindly to pay my passage in an open boat, which was to take him there. We went: he observed on the passage, that he had always feared the water, and would prefer any death almost to that of drowning. He was drowned the next season while on a visit to the continent.
We reached Belmullet; he secured me a lodging; but the rector called and invited me to spend the time at his house, and I did so. But here was a place which might justly be called the "fag-end" of misery. It semed to be a spinning out of all that was fearful in suffering, and whoever turned his eye there needed no other point of observation, to see all that famine and pestilence could do. It appeared like a vast crucible, where had been concocted all that was odious, all that was suffering; and which had been emptied, leaving the dregs of the mass unfit for any use.
Well did James Tuke say, in his graphic description
