Page:Annalsoffaminein00nich.djvu/187

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
FAMINE IN IRELAND
181

was traveling informed me that at nightfall the preceding day, he found a company who had gathered a few sticks and fastened them into the ditch, and spread over what miserable rags they could collect (for the rain was fast pouring); and under these more than two hundred men, women, and children, were to crawl for the night. He alighted from his car, and counted more than two hundred; they had all that day been driven out, and not one pound of any kind of food was in the whole encampment!

When I went over desolate Erris, and saw the demolished cabins belonging to J. Walshe, I begged to know if all had died from that hamlet—"Worse than died," was the answer; for if they are alive, they are in sandbanks on the bleak sea-shore, or crowded into some miserable cabin for a night or two, waiting for death; they are lingering out the last hours of suffering. Oh! ye poor, ye miserable oppressors! what will ye do, when the day of God's wrath shall come? Have ye ever thought what "rock and mountain" ye can call upon to screen your naked heads, who would not here give the poor and hungry a shelter? When "the elements shall melt with fervent heat;" then shall the blaze of these ruins scorch and scathe you; yea, burn you up, if you do not now make haste to repent. Ye lords, when the Lord of lords, and God of gods, shall gird on his sword; then shall these poor be a swift witness against you. The widow and the fatherless ye have delighted to oppress, because they could not resist you, and yet you dare to call yourselves by