"The question may fairly be proposed—What comfort can a man have in such circumstances? Can he find some relief from his misery, as many have found and still find it, by conversing with his wife? No. To suppose this, is to imagine him standing in a higher class of beings than the one of which he has always formed a part. Like himself, too, his wife is oppressed; the growth of her faculties is stunted; and, it may be, she is hungry, faint, and sick. Can he talk with his children? No. What can he, who knows nothing, tell them? What hope can he stimulate who has nothing to promise? Can he ask in a neighbour? No. He has no hospitality to offer him, and the cabin is crowded with his own family. Can he accost a stranger who may travel in the direction of his hovel, to make himself personally acquainted with his condition and that of others? No. He speaks a language foreign to an Englishman or a Scotchman, and which those who hate the 'Saxon,' whatever compliments they may pay him for their own purposes, use all the means they possess to maintain. Can he even look at his pig with the expectation that he will one day eat the pork or the bacon it will yield? No; not he. He knows that not a bone of the loin or a rasher will be his. That pig will go, like all the pigs he has had, to pay his rent. Only one comfort remains, which he has in common with his pig and his dog, the warmth of his peat fire. Poor Donoghue! thou belongest to a race often celebrated as 'the finest peasantry in the world,' but it would be difficult to find a savage in his native forest who is not better off than thou!" There is one other comfort besides the peat fire, which Donoghue may have, and that is an occasional gill of whisky—a temporary comfort, an ultimate destruction—a new fetter to bind him down in his almost brutal condition. In Ireland, as in England, intoxication is the Lethe in which the heart-sick labourers strive to forget their sorrows. Intemperance prevails most where poverty is most generally felt. The Pictorial Times thus sketches a cabin of the better class, belonging to a man named Pat Brennan:—