with a bed in it for the accommodation of the two ladies, who had never like me been jolted on this wise, and were now submitting to all this hardship for my amusement. With much fixing and re-fixing, ordering and re-ordering, bed, baskets of lunch, extra cloaks, and so on, all adjusted, we were "well under way" for these "Alps on Alps." We had not made more than two miles of this journey, when stones, brooks, and no road said "Ye can go no further." We did, by getting out and lifting the cart, and at length found ourselves in a flat vale with a pretty river flowing through it. Scattered here and there were the once comfortable cabins of the tenants of the last-named Mrs. G., now every cabin either deserted or suffering in silent hopelessness, and all the land lying waste.
The poor cabiners would meet us, and say to their landlady, "God bless ye, and once ye didn't see us so, but now we are all destrawed." "And how, Mary or Bridget, do you get on?—have you any meal?—and I am sorry that I couldn't send you any more," &c, were the salutations of this kind landlady, who had not received one pound of rent since the famine. I thanked her most gratefully for the favor she bestowed on me in keeping from my ears those heart-scathing words to the starving poor I had heard so much from landlords and relieving officers during the famine. "I could not upbraid them," she answered, "for until the famine, scarcely a pound of rent has been lost by them all; and my only sorrow is, that I can do nothing to keep them alive, and not lose them from the land."
