I have never read of a race who, in great poverty and many privations, attach a higher value to the consideration that is bestowed on them than to the actual material boons, and feel such a seemingly disproportioned gratitude for kind words and generous actions. What might not be anticipated from a revulsion of sentiment in a people like this? To what violence might not this passion for vengeance be carried if the notion possessed them that they, whom she called her betters, only traded on the weakness of their poverty and the imbecility of their good faith? It was in a fruitful soil of this kind that the agitator now sowed the seeds of distrust and disorder, and with what fatal rapidity the poison reproduced itself and spread, the history of late years is the testimony.... I have said already, and I repeat it here, that this character of Mary Martin is purely fictitious; and there is the more need I should say it since there was once a young lady of this very name, many traits of whose affection for the people and their wellbeing might be supposed to be my original. To my great regret I have never had the happiness to meet her; however, I have heard much of her devotion and goodness. I am not sure that some of my subordinate characters were not drawn from life. Mrs Nelligan, I remember, had her type in a little Galway town I once stopped at; and Dan Nelligan had much in common with one who has since held a distinguished place on the Bench. Of the terrible epidemic which devastated Ireland, there was much for which I drew on my own experience. Of its fearful ravages in the West, in the wilds of Clare, and that lonely promontory which stretches at the mouth of the Shannon into the Atlantic, I had been the daily witness; and even to recall some of the incidents passingly was an effort of great pain. Of one of the features of the people at this disastrous time I could not say enough; nor could any words of mine do justice to the splendid heroism with which they bore up, and the noble generosity they showed to each other in misfortune. It is but too often remarked how selfish men are made by misery, and how fatal is a common affliction to that charity that cares for others. There was none of this here: I never in any condition or class recognised more traits of thoughtful kindness and self-denial than I did amongst these poor, famished, and forgotten people. I never witnessed, in the same perfection, how a widespread affliction could call up a humanity great as itself, and make very commonplace natures something actually heroic and glorious. Nothing short of the fatal tendency I have to digression, and the watchful care I am bound to bestow against this fault, prevented me from narrating several incidents with which my own experience had made me acquainted. Foreign as these were to the burden of my tale, it was only by an effort I overcame the temptation to recall them. If a nation is to be judged by her bearing under calamity, Ireland--and she