A specimen of the in-door horrors of Scull may be seen in the sketch of a hut of a poor man named Mullins, who lay dying in a corner, upon a heap of straw supplied by the Relief Committee, while his three wretched children crouched over a few embers of turf, as if to raise the last remaining spark of life. This poor man, it appears, had buried his wife about five days before, and was, in all probability, on the eve of joining her, when he was found out by the efforts of the vicar, who, for a few short days, saved him from that which no kindness could ultimately avert. The dimensions of Mullins's hut did not exceed ten feet square, and the dirt and filth was ankle-deep upon the floor.
"Commander Caffin, the captain of the steam-sloop Scourge, on the south coast of Ireland, has written a letter to a friend, dated February 15, 1847, in which he gives a most distressing and graphic account of the scenes he witnessed in the course of his duty in discharging a cargo of meal at Scull. After stating that three-fourths of the inhabitants carry a tale of wo in their countenances, and are reduced to mere skeletons, he mentions the result of what he saw while going through the parish with the rector, Dr. Traill. He says—
"'Famine exists to a fearful degree, with all its horrors. Fever has sprung up, consequent upon the wretchedness; and swellings of limbs and body, and diarrhœa, upon the want of nourishment, are everywhere to be found. Dr. Traill's parish is twenty-one miles in extent, containing about eighteen thousand souls, with not more than half a dozen gentlemen in the whole of it. He drove me about five or six miles; but we commenced our visits before leaving the village, and in no house that I entered was there not to be found the dead or dying. In particularizing two or three, they may be taken as the features of the whole. There was no picking or choosing, but we took them just as they came.
"'The first which I shall mention was a cabin, rather above the ordinary ones in appearance and comfort; in it were three young women, and one young man, and three children, all crouched over a fire—pictures of misery. Dr. Traill asked after the father, upon which one of the girls opened a door leading into another cabin, and there were the father and mother in bed; the father the most wretched picture of starvation possible to conceive, a skeleton with life, his power of speech gone; the mother but a little better—her cries for mercy and food were heart-rending. It was sheer destitution that had brought them to this. They had been well to do in the world, with their cow, and few sheep, and potato-ground. Their crops failed, and their cattle were stolen; although, anticipating this, they had taken their cow and sheep into the cabin with them every night, but they were stolen in the daytime. The son had worked on the road, and earned his 8d. a day, but this would not keep the family, and he, from work and insufficiency of food, is laid up, and will soon be as bad as his father. They had nothing to eat in the house, and I could see no hope for any one of them.
"'In another cabin we went into, a mother and her daughter were there—the daughter emaciated, and lying against the wall—the mother naked upon some straw on the ground, with a rug over her—a most distressing object of misery. She writhed about, and bared her limbs, in order to show her state of exhaustion. She had wasted away until nothing but the skin covered the bones—she cannot have survived to this time.
"'Another that I entered had, indeed, the appearance of wretchedness without, but its inside was misery! Dr. Traill, on putting his head inside the hole which answered for a door, said, 'Well, Philis, how is your mother to-day?—he having been with her the day before—and was replied to, 'Oh, sir, is it you? Mother is dead!' and there, fearful reality, was the daughter, a skeleton herself, crouched and crying over the lifeless body of her mother, which was on the floor, cramped up as she had died, with her rags and her cloak about her, by the side of a few embers of peat. In the next cabin were three young children belonging to the daughter, whose husband had run away from her, all pictures of death. The poor creature said she did not know what to do with the corpse—she had no means of getting it removed, and she was too exhausted to remove it herself: this cabin was about three miles from the rectory. In another cabin, the door of which was stopped with dung, was a poor woman whom we had taken by surprise, as she roused up evidently much astonished. She burst into tears upon seeing the doctor, and said she had not been enabled to sleep since the corpse of the woman had lain in her bed. This was a poor creature who was passing this miserable cabin, and asked the old woman to allow her to rest herself for a few moments, when she had laid down, but never rose up again; she died in an hour or so, from sheer exhaustion. The body had remained in this hovel of six feet square with the poor old woman for four days, and she could not get anybody to remove it.'
"The letter proceeds:—
"'I could in this manner take you through the thirty or more cottages we visited; but they, without exception, were all alike—the dead and the dying in each; and I could tell you more of the truth of the heart-rending scene were I to mention the lamentations and bitter cryings of each of these poor creatures on the threshold of death. Never in my life have I seen such wholesale misery, nor could I have thought it so complete.'"—Illustrated News, February 20, 1847. [At this period, famine prevailed throughout Ireland.]
At the village of Mienils, a man named Leahey perished during the great famine, with many circumstances of horror. When too weak, from want of food, to help himself, he was stretched in his filthy hovel, when his famished dogs attacked and so mangled him that he expired in intense agony. Can the history of any other country present such terrible instances of misery and starvation? The annals of Ireland have been dark, indeed; and those who have wilfully cast that gloom upon them, must emancipate Africans, and evangelize the rest of mankind, for a century, at least, to lay the ghosts of the murdered Irish.
An Irish funeral of later days, with its attendant circumstances of poverty and gloom, is truly calculated to stir the sensitive heart of a poet. The obsequies display the meagre results of attempts to bury the dead with decency. The mourners are few, but their grief is sincere; and they weep for the lost as they would be wept for when Death, who is ever walking by their side, lays his cold hand on them. During the great famine, some poor wretches perished while preparing funerals for their friends. In the following verses, published in Howitt's Journal, of the 1st of April, 1847, we have a fine delineation of an Irish funeral, such as only a poet could give:—