of the famine will be on us, and we shall die with hunger; the blackguard taxes will take all the cattle, and we took 'em here, plaise your riverence, to ate, and let the soldiers shoot us, and that will be the quick death for us; better than the long hunger, your riverence—better than the hunger." Now, that was certainly, for "barbarians," quite a civilized, if not philosophical answer, and quite in keeping with Irish coolness in difficulty and danger. It was something like a company from a district in the south of Ireland, in the time of the first winter of the famine. They had given up all hope of life, and consulted to go in company to the poorhouse, and die there, that they might be buried in coffins. Such a haggard array of misery had never been seen before in one body, and the soldiers were ordered to be on the spot at the workhouse to keep all in safety. These despairing creatures paused before the red coats and guns, and implored them to shoot them down, and end their long misery at once. This was no false bravado. They were sincere, and not one among them, it is believed, would have shrunk in the face of that death.
This rebellion, it should be told, was not that ungrateful affair as has been represented. It was not agitated, or scarcely known, among the thousands who had been charitably fed in the famine. It originated among the higher classes of well-fed politicians, who were too enlightened not to know the causes of their country's sufferings, and too humane to look on with indifference. They were seconded by a lower class of
