a bloody moral to the country. The slaps,
gates, and enclosures were down--the hedges broken or cut away--the
fences trampled on and levelled to the earth--and nothing seemed to
thrive--for the garden was overrun with them--but the rank weeds already
alluded to, as those which love to trace the footsteps of ruin and
desolation, in order to show, as it were, what they leave behind them.
As we advanced, other and more startling proofs of M'Clutchy came in our
way--proofs which did not consist of ruined houses, desolate villages,
or roofless-cottages--but of those unfortunate persons, whose simple
circle of domestic life--whose little cares, and struggles, and sorrows,
and affections, formed the whole round of their humble existence,
and its enjoyments, as given them by Almighty God himself. All these,
however, like the feelings and affections of the manacled slave, were
as completely overlooked by those who turned them adrift, as if in
possessing such feelings, they had invaded a right which belonged
only to their betters, and which,the same betters, by the way, seldom
exercise either in such strength or purity as those whom they despise
and oppress. Aged men we met, bent, with years, and weighed down still
more by that houseless sorrow, which is found accompanying them along
the highways of life:--through its rugged solitudes and its dreariest
paths--in the storm and in the tempest--wherever they go--in want,
nakedness, and destitution--still at their side is that houseless
sorrow--pouring into their memories and their hearts the conviction,
which is most terrible to old age, that it has no home here but the
grave--no pillow on which to forget its cares but the dust. The sight
of these wretched old men, turned out from, the little holdings that
sheltered their helplessness, to beg a morsel, through utter charity, in
the decrepitude of life, was enough to make a man wish that he had
never been born to witness such a wanton abuse of that power which
was entrusted to man for the purpose of diffusing happiness instead of
misery. All these were known to Raymond, who, as far as he could, gave
me their brief and unfortunate history. That which showed us, however,
the heartless evils of the-clearance system in its immediate operation
upon the poorer classes, was the groups of squalid females who traversed
the country, accompanied by their pale and sickly looking children, all
in a state of mendicancy, and wofully destitute of clo