We did not write this story for effect.  Our object was to relate facts that occurred.  In Ireland, there is much blame justly attached to landlords, for their neglect and severity, in such depressed times, towards their tenants:  there is also much that is not only indefensible but atrocious on the part of the tenants.  But can the landed proprietors of Ireland plead ignorance or want of education for their neglect and rapacity, whilst the crimes of the tenants, on the contrary, may in general be ascribed to both?  He who lives—­as, perhaps, his forefathers have done—­upon any man’s property, and fails from unavoidable calamity, has as just and clear a light to assistance from the landlord as if the amount of that aid were a bonded debt.  Common policy, common sense, and common justice, should induce the Irish landlords to lower their rents according to the market for agricultural produce, otherwise poverty, famine, crime, and vague political speculations, founded upon idle hopes of a general transfer of property, will spread over and convulse the kingdom.  Any man who looks into our poverty may see that our landlords ought to reduce their rents to a standard suitable to the times and to the ability of the tenant.

But to return.  Owen, for another year, struggled on for his family, without success; his firm spirit was broken; employment he could not get, and even had it been regular, he would have found it impracticable to support his helpless wife and children by his labor.  The next year unhappily was also one of sickness and of want; the country was not only a wide waste of poverty, but overspread with typhus fever.  One Saturday night he and the family found themselves without food; they had not tasted a morsel for twenty-four hours.  There were murmuring and tears and, finally, a low conversation among them, as if they held a conference upon some subject which filled them with both grief and satisfaction.  In this alternation of feeling did they pass the time until the sharp gnawing of hunger was relieved by sleep.  A keen December wind blew with a bitter blast on the following morning; the rain was borne along upon it with violence, and the cold was chill and piercing.  Owen, his wife, and their six children, issued at day-break out of the barn in which, ever since their removal from Tubber Derg, they had lived until then; their miserable fragments of bed-clothes were tied in a bundle to keep them dry; their pace was slow, need we say sorrowful; all were in tears.  Owen and Kathleen went first, with a child upon the back, and another in the hand, of each.  Their route lay by their former dwelling, the door of which was open, for it had not been inhabited.  On passing it they stood a moment; then with a simultaneous impulse both approached—­entered—­and took one last look of a spot to which their hearts clung with enduring attachment.  They then returned; and as they passed, Owen put forth his hand, picked a few small pebbles out of the wall, and put them in his pocket.