me
literally at Mr. Browne's homestead.

It has been my lot at various times to witness the institution known
as "home" in a state of denudation, as my scientific friends would
call it. It is not necessary to go far from the site of Whitechapel
Church to find dwellings unutterably wretched. Two years ago I saw
people reduced to one "family" pair of boots in Sheffield, and without
food, or fire to cook it with if they had had it; and I have seen a
Cornish woman making turnip pie. But for general misery I think the
home of the Browne family at Cloontakilla equals, and more than equals
anything I have seen during a long experience of painful sights. The
road to it as already described, is a quagmire, and the dwelling, when
arrived at, exceeds the wildest of nightmares. Part of the stone wall
has fallen in, and the two rooms which remain have the ground for a
carpet and miserable starved-looking thatch for a roof. The horses and
cattle of every gentleman in England, and especially Mr. Tankerville
Chamberlayne's Berkshire pigs, are a thousand times better lodged than
the family of the irreconcilable Browne. The chimney, if ever there
were one, has long since "caved in" and vanished, and the smoke from a
few lumps of turf burning on the hearth finds its way through the sore
places in the thatch. In a bed in the corner of the room lies a sick
woman, coughing badly; near her sits another woman, huddled over the
fire. Now, I have been quite long enough in the world to be
suspicious, and had it been possible for these poor people to have
known of my coming I should certainly have been inclined to suspect a
prepared scene. But this was impossible, for even my car-driver did
not know where he was going till he started. And as we could not find
the house without the Mountain Sylph, the inference must be in favour
of all being genuine. There are no indications of cooking going on,
and, bating an iron pot, a three-legged stool, a bench, half a dozen
willow-pattern dishes, and a few ropes of straw suspended from the
roof with the evident object of supporting something which is not
there, no signs of property are visible. And this is the outcome of a
farm of five acres--Irish acres, be it well understood. There is
nothing at all to feed man, wife, sister-in-law, son, and daughter
during the winter, and the snow is already lying deep on Nephin.

While my inspection of the Browne domicile has been going on, the
Mountain Sylph has vanish