During these melancholy periods of
want, everything in the shape of an esculent disappears. The miserable
creatures will pick up chicken-weed, nettles, sorrell, bug-loss,
preshagh, and sea-weed, which they will boil and eat with the voracity
of persons writhing under the united agonies of hunger and death! Yet
the very country thus groaning under such a terrible sweep of famine is
actually pouring from all her ports a profusion of food, day after day;
flinging it from her fertile bosom, with the wanton excess of a prodigal
oppressed by abundance.
Despite, however, of all the poor scholar's nurse-guard suffered, he was
attended with a fidelity of care and sympathy which no calamity could
shake. Nor was this care fruitless; after the fever had passed through
its usual stages he began to recover. In fact, it has been observed
very truly, that scarcely any person has been known to die under
circumstances similar to those of the poor scholar. These sheds, the
erection of which is not unfrequent in case of fever, have the advantage
of pure free air, by which the patient is cooled and refreshed. Be the
cause of it what it may, the fact has been established, and we feel
satisfaction in being able to adduce our humble hero as an additional
proof of the many recoveries which take place in situations apparently
so unfavorable to human life. But how is it possible to detail what
M'Evoy suffered during this fortnight of intense agony? Not those
who can command the luxuries of life--not those who can reach
its comforts--nor those who can supply themselves with its bare
necessaries--neither the cotter who struggles to support his wife and
helpless children--the mendicant who begs from door to door--nor even
the felon in his cell--can imagine what he felt in the solitary misery
of his feverish bed.
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