however painful the process, and though judgment long delay, yet it must come at last; the wheel of Providence is ever rolling, and every spoke belonging to it must in turn be uppermost, and the oppressed cannot always be at the bottom.
The object of this volume is to place before the world a plain and simple outline of what is called the Famine of Ireland, in 1846-7-8-9.
But before I take the reader down the sides of this dreadful gulf, before I uncover to him the bowels of that loathsome pit, on the margin of which he often may have tremblingly stood, I will gird up his mind for the conflict, by taking him, in the autumn of 1845, and the spring of 1846, through the more fertile and happy north, where we are told that better management has produced better results; there we shall find mementos of deep interest, when, ages now passed away, this people stood out to surrounding nations not as a "byword and hissing," but as a noble example of religion, industry, and prosperity, which few if any could then present. And though its early history is quite obscured by fiction, and interlarded with poetical romance, yet all this serves to prove that the remains of a true coin are there, or a counterfeit would not have been attempted.
Not only in the north, but scattered over the whole island, are found inscriptions on stone, some standing above ground and others buried beneath, which, by their dates and hieroglyphics, tell you that centuries ago men lived here, whose memories were honored, not
