"I had been rather surprised at the scarcity of beggars in Belfast, but the beggary of Drogheda fully came up to the travellers' descriptions. They were of every possible variety. At the first turn the coach made in the town, we were very near running over a blind man, who knelt in the liquid mud of the gutter (the calves of his legs quite covered by the pool, and only his heels appearing above), and held up in his hands the naked and footless stumps of a boy's legs. The child sat in a wooden box, with his back against the man's breast, and ate away very unconcernedly at a loaf of bread, while the blind exhibitor turned his face up to the sky, and, waving the stumps slightly from side to side, kept up a vociferation for charity that was heard above all the turmoil of the market place. When we stopped to change horses, the entire population, as deep as they could stand, at least with any chance of being heard, held out their hands, and in every conceivable tone and mode of arresting the attention, implored charity. The sight was awful: old age in shapes so hideous, I should think the most horrible nightmare never had conceived. The rain poured down upon their tangled and uncovered heads, seaming, with its cleansing torrents, faces so hollow, so degraded in expression, and, withal, so clotted with filth and neglect, that they seemed like features of which the very owners had long lost, not only care, but consciousness and remembrance; as if, in the horrors of want and idiotcy, they had anticipated the corrupting apathy of the grave, and abandoned every thing except the hunger which gnawed them into memory of existence. The feeble blows and palsied fighting of these hag-like spectres for the pence thrown to them from the coach, and the howling, harsh, and unnatural voices in which they imprecated curses on each other in the fury of the struggle, have left a remembrance in my mind, which deepens immeasurably my fancied _nadir_ of human abandonment and degradation. God's image so blasted, so defiled, so sunk below the beasts that perish, I would not have believed was to be found in the same world with _hope_."