ails of
Melrose Abbey; and includes, beneath its basement arches, a Carrara
marble sitting statue of Scott, with his dog _Maida_, by his side, which
is the work of Mr. Steel, and cost 2,000 pounds.

The potato crop utterly failed again in Ireland, and the outlook there
was indeed black. In the _Times_ of 2 Sep., its correspondent, writing
from Dublin, on 31 Aug., says: "As it is now an admitted fact, on all
sides, that the destruction of the early potato crop is complete, there
can be no earthly use in loading your columns with repetitions of the sad
details, as furnished day after day in the accounts published by the
Irish newspapers. It will, therefore, nearly suffice to say that,
according to the reports from all quarters, the crisis of deep and
general distress cannot be much longer averted, and that it will require
all the energies of both Government and Landlords to mitigate the
inevitable consequences of a calamity, of which both parties have been
duly forewarned. In the meantime, the following statement in a Limerick
paper of Saturday, is another curious illustration of the Irish
'difficulty'.

"'In the Corn Market, this day, there appeared about 4,000 bushels of
oats, and about an equal quantity of wheat. All this grain was purchased
up, principally for exportation, whilst the food of the people, as
exhibited this day in the Potato Market, was a mass of disease and
rottenness. This is an anomaly which no intricacies of political
economy--no legal quibbles, or crochets--no Government arrangements can
reconcile. In an agricultural country which produces the finest corn for
the food of man, we have to record that the corn is sold and sent out of
the country, whilst the individuals that raised it by their toil and
labour, are threatened with all the horrors of starvation.'

"From a multiplicity of concurrent statements respecting the pestilence,
I shall merely subjoin one, which appears in the last _Tralee_ paper: 'A
man would hardly dig in a day, as much sound potatoes as himself would
consume. But that is not the worst of it. Common cholera has set in
among the people of the town, owing to the use of potatoes, which contain
a large quantity of poisonous matter. A professional gentleman in this
town, of considerable experience and unquestioned integrity, assures me,
that he has attended, within the last fortnight, in this town and
neighbourhood, more than 12 cases of common cholera, and that he would
t