pon the young creatures wasting away unmurmuringly
by slow consuming destitution. I am sure they would have been touched to
the liveliest compassion at the spectacle, and have been ready to divide
their wardrobe with the sufferers.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 22.--Dr. H---- called to take me into the Castle-haven
parish, which comes within his circuit. This district borders upon the
sea, whose rocky indented shores are covered with cabins of a worse
description than those in Skibbereen. On our way, we passed several
companies of men, women, and children at work, all enfeebled and
emaciated by destitution. Women with their red, swollen feet partially
swathed in old rags, some in men's coats, with their arms or skirts torn
off, were sitting by the road-side, breaking stone. It was painful to
see human labour and life struggling among the lowest interests of
society. Men, once athletic labourers, were trying to eke out a few
miserable days to their existence, by toiling upon these works. Poor
creatures! Many of them are already famine-stricken. They have reached a
point from which they cannot be recovered. Dr. D---- informs me that he
can tell at a glance whether a person has reached this point. And I am
assured by several experienced observers, that there are thousands of
men who rise in the morning and go forth to labour with their picks and
shovels in their hands, who are irrecoverably doomed to death. No human
aid can save them. The plague spot of famine is on their foreheads; the
worm of want has eaten in two their heart strings. Still they go forth
uncomplaining to their labour and toil, cold, and half naked upon the
roads, and divide their eight or ten pence worth of food at night among
a sick family of five or eight persons. Some one is often kept at home,
and prevented from earning this pittance, by the fear that some one of
their family will die before their return. The first habitation we
entered in the Castle-haven district was literally a hole in the wall,
occupied by what might be called in America, a squatter, or a man who
had burrowed a place for himself and family in the acute angle of two
dilapidated walls by the road-side, where he lived rent free. We entered
this stinted den by an aperture about three feet high, and found one or
two children lying asleep with their eyes open in the straw. Such, at
least, was their appearance, for they scarcely winked while we were
before them. The father came in and told his pitif