5.--Poor uncle is dead. He was buried yesterday. Ellen keeps hovering between life and death; she has youth on her side. Poor Bridget is worn to a shadow, waiting on the sick. Being told a ship that came in this forenoon was from Sligo, I watched a chance to get on board, expecting to find some I knew among her passengers. I found her deck crowded with emigrants, watching the sailors fish up from the hold with boat-hooks the bodies of those who had died since entering the river. I soon learned there was bad blood between the crew and passengers, all of whom who could do so had left the steerage two days before and lived on deck. The hold had grown so loathsome with the warm weather that it became unbearable. The crew resented their living on deck. The captain stood at the poop rail, and proved to be a civil man. He told me he had done his best for the passengers on the voyage, but the charterers had poorly provisioned the vessel and he could not therefore give them the rations he wished. For the bad feeling between the sailors and passengers he could not blame either. Staying on deck the emigrants were in the sailors’ way, yet he could not order them back to the hold. Three sailors had caught the fever during the week, which incensed their comrades against the emigrants. He was to pay the sailors a sovereign for each body brought up. I told him of Captain Christian of the ship Sisters, who, the week before, when emigrants and sailors refused for any money to go into the hold to bring up the dead, went down himself and carried them to the deck on his shoulders. I hope he may live to know that Irishmen are grateful, for he is now down with the fever. I recognized none of the passengers, for they were from the northwest end of Lord Palmerston’s estates. Their poverty was extreme. They had no luggage and many had not rags enough to cover their nakedness. So haggard and white were they, so vacant their expression, that they looked more like an array of spectres, than of human beings. Coming back, I had painful evidence of the brutal indifference of the authorities in dealing with the sick. They continue to be brought from the ships to the quay in rowboats, and the line of ships being now two miles long, the journey is a long one, and often fatal in bad weather. A small steamboat for transferring them would be a godsend, but the government does not get one, does not even spend ten shillings to replace the broken planks of the steps on the quay, although the want of them causes many a feeble one to slip into the river.