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death now commenced; the volcano, over which I felt that Ireland was walking, had burst, though its appearance was wholly different from anything I had ever conceived; a famine was always in Ireland, in a certain degree; and so common were beggars, and so many were always but just struggling for life, that not until thousands were reduced to the like condition of the woman last mentioned, did those, who had never begged, make their wants known. They picked over and picked out their blackened potatoes, and even ate the decayed ones, till many were made sick, before the real state of the country was known; and when it fell, it fell like an avalanche, sweeping at once the entire land. No parish need be anxious for neighboring ones—each had enough under his own eye, and at his own door, to drain all resources, and keep alive his sympathy. It was some months before the rich really believed that the poor were not making false pretenses; for at such a distance had they ever kept themselves from the "lower order," who were all "dirty and lazy," that many of them had never realized that four millions of people were subsisting entirely on the potato, and that another million ate them six days out of seven, entirely; they did not realize that these "lazy ones" had worked six or eight months in the year for eightpence and tenpence, but more for sixpence, and even threepence in the southern parts, and the other four months been "idle" because "no man had hired them;" they did not realize that the disgusting rags with which these "lazy" ones disgraced their very gates, and