their poor devoted father
sacrificed his life for them, as the neighbours found some Indian meal
in the place, which he was evidently reserving for his infant children,
whilst he suffered himself to die of starvation.

But a common effect of the Famine was to harden the hearts of the
people, and blunt their natural feelings. Hundreds, remarks this
correspondent, are daily expiring in their cabins in the three parishes
of this neighbourhood, and the people are becoming so accustomed to
death that they have lost all those kindly sympathies for the relatives
of the departed, which formerly characterized their natures. Want and
destitution have so changed them, that a sordid avarice, and a
greediness of disposition to grasp at everything in the shape of food,
has seized hold of the souls of those who were considered the most
generous and hospitable race on the face of the earth. As happened in
other places, no persons attended the funerals; those who were still
alive were so exhausted that they were unable to inter the dead, and the
duty of doing so was frequently left to casual passers-by.

About the middle of February, Commander Caffin, of Her Majesty's ship
"Scourge," visited Skull, in company with the rector, the Rev. Robert
Traill Hall. After having entered a few houses, the Commander said to
the Revd. gentleman, "My pre-conceived ideas of your misery seem as a
dream to me compared with the reality." And yet Captain Caffin had only
time to see the cabins on the roadside, in which the famine was not so
terrible as it was up among the hills and fastnesses, where, in one
wretched hovel, whose two windows were stuffed with straw, the Rev. Mr.
Hall found huddled together sixteen human beings. They did not, however,
belong to one family--three wretched households were congregated into
this miserable abode. Out of the sixteen, two only could be said to be
able to work; and on the exertions of those "two poor pallid objects"
had the rest to depend. Eight of the others were crowded into one
pallet,--it could not be called a bed, being formed of a little straw,
which scarcely kept them from the cold mud floor. A poor father was
still able to sit up, but his legs were dreadfully swollen, and he was
dead in two or three days after the Rev. Mr. Hall's visit. Beside him
lay his sister, and at his feet two children--all hastening to eternity.

Captain Caffin wrote to a friend an account of his visit to Skull, and
his letter was pu