ections, or to intimate to our readers how far his determination
to bring Condy Dalton to justice originated in repentance for having
concealed his knowledge of the murder, or in some other less justifiable
state of feeling. At this moment, indeed, the family of the Daltons wore
in anything but a position to bear the heavy and terrible blow which was
about to fail upon them. Our readers cannot forget the pitiable state in
which we left them, during that distressing crisis of misery, when the
strange woman arrived with the oat-meal, which the kind-hearted Mave
Sullivan had so generously sent them. On that melancholy occasion her
lover complained of being ill, and, unfortunately, the symptoms were,
in this instance, too significant of the malady which followed them.
Indeed, it would be an infliction of unnecessary pain to detail here the
sufferings which this unhappy family had individually and collectively
borne. Young Condy, after a fortnight's prostration from typhus fever,
was again upon his legs, tottering about, as his father had been, in
a state of such helplessness between want of food on the one hand, and
illness on the other, as it is distressing even to contemplate. If,
however, the abstract consideration of it, even at a distance, be a
matter of such painful retrospect to the mind, what must not the actual
endurance of that and worse have been to the thousands upon thousands
of families who were obliged, by God's mysterious dispensation, to
encounter these calamities in all their almost incredible and hideous
reality.

At this precise period, the state of the country was frightful beyond
belief; for it is well known that the mortality of the season we
are describing was considerably greater than that which even cholera
occasioned in its worst and most malignant ravages. Indeed, the latter
was not attended by such a tedious and lingering train of miseries
as that, which in so many woful shapes, surrounded typhus fever.
The appearance of cholera was sudden, and its operations quick, and
although, on that account, it was looked upon with tenfold terror, yet
for this very reason, the consequences which it produced were by no
means so full of affliction and distress, nor presented such strong and
pitiable claims on human aid and sympathy as did those of typhus. In the
one case, the victim was cut down by a sudden stroke, which occasioned
a shock or moral paralysis both to himself and the survivors--especially
to th