FAMINE SCENE IN IRELAND From a photograph by A. Ayton, Londonderry

THE FAMINE YEAR.

Weary men, what reap ye?" Golden corn for the stranger." What sow ye?" Human corses that await for the Avenger." Fainting forms, all hunger-stricken, what see you in the offing?

"Stately ships to bear our food away amid the stranger's scoffing."

There's a proud array of soldiers-what do they round your door?

"They guard our master's granaries from the thin hands of the poor."

Pale mothers, wherefore weeping?-" Would to God that we were dead

Our children swoon before us, and we cannot give them bread!"

Little children, tears are strange upon your infant faces,

God meant you but to smile within your mother's soft embraces.

"Oh! we know not what is smiling, and we know not what is dying;

But we're hungry, very hungry, and we cannot stop our

crying;

And some of us grow cold and white-we know not what it

means.

But as they lie beside us we tremble in our dreams.”

There's a gaunt crowd on the highway-are ye come to pray

to man,

With hollow eyes that cannot weep, and for words your faces wan?

"No; the blood is dead within our veins; we care not now for life;

Let us die hid in the ditches, far from children and from wife;
We cannot stay to listen to their raving, famished cries—
Bread! Bread! Bread!—and none to still their agonies.
We left an infant playing with her dead mother's hand:
We left a maiden maddened by the fever's scorching brand: "
Better, maiden, thou wert strangled in thy own dark-twisted
tresses!

Better, infant, thou wert smothered in thy mother's first

caresses.

"We are fainting in our misery, but God will hear our groan; Yea, if fellow-men desert us, He will hearken from His throne!