"'Another that I entered had, indeed, the appearance of wretchedness without, but its inside was misery! Dr. Traill, on putting his head inside the hole which answered for a door, said, 'Well, Philis, how is your mother to-day?—he having been with her the day before—and was replied to, 'Oh, sir, is it you? Mother is dead!' and there, fearful reality, was the daughter, a skeleton herself, crouched and crying over the lifeless body of her mother, which was on the floor, cramped up as she had died, with her rags and her cloak about her, by the side of a few embers of peat. In the next cabin were three young children belonging to the daughter, whose husband had run away from her, all pictures of death. The poor creature said she did not know what to do with the corpse—she had no means of getting it removed, and she was too exhausted to remove it herself: this cabin was about three miles from the rectory. In another cabin, the door of which was stopped with dung, was a poor woman whom we had taken by surprise, as she roused up evidently much astonished. She burst into tears upon seeing the doctor, and said she had not been enabled to sleep since the corpse of the woman had lain in her bed. This was a poor creature who was passing this miserable cabin, and asked the old woman to allow her to rest herself for a few moments, when she had laid down, but never rose up again; she died in an hour or so, from sheer exhaustion. The body had remained in this hovel of six feet square with the poor old woman for four days, and she could not get anybody to remove it.' "The letter proceeds:— "'I could in this manner take you through the thirty or more cottages we visited; but they, without exception, were all alike—the dead and the dying in each; and I could tell you more of the truth of the heart-rending scene were I to mention the lamentations and bitter cryings of each of these poor creatures on the threshold of death. Never in my life have I seen such wholesale misery, nor could I have thought it so complete.'"—_Illustrated News_, February 20, 1847. [At this period, famine prevailed throughout Ireland.] At the village of Mienils, a man named Leahey perished during the great famine, with many circumstances of horror. When too weak, from want of food, to help himself, he was stretched in his filthy hovel, when his famished dogs attacked and so mangled him that he expired in intense agony. Can the history of any other country present such terrible instances of misery and starvation? The annals of Ireland have been dark, indeed; and those who have wilfully cast that gloom upon them, must emancipate Africans, and evangelize the rest of mankind, for a century, at least, to lay the ghosts of the murdered Irish.