Page:Annalsoffaminein00nich.djvu/139

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FAMINE IN IRELAND
133

was served, as is the custom in Ireland, one of the daughters of the family passing a window, looked down upon the pavement and saw a corpse with a blanket spread over it, lying upon the walk beneath the window. It was a mother and infant, dead, and a daughter of sixteen had brought and laid her there, hoping to induce the people to put her in a coffin; and as if she had been listening to the conversation at the dinner of the want of coffins, she had placed her mother under the very window and eye, where these wine-bibbing ministers might apply the lesson. All was hushed, the blinds were immediately down, and a few sixpences were quite unostentatiously sent out to the poor girl, as a beginning, to procure a coffin. The lesson ended here.

And I would conclude this episode by saying, that at the door of professed Christians of the intelligent class, lies the sin of intemperance in that suffering country, and though some of them have preached and labored hard in those dark days, yet they have not done, what they could, and in this they should not be commended; but rebuked most faithfully.