Fever has sprung up consequent
upon the wretchedness; and swellings of limbs and body, and diarrhoea,
from the want of nourishment, are everywhere to be found." Again: "In no
house that I entered was there not to be found the dead or dying; in
particularizing two or three they may be taken as the picture of the
whole--there was no picking or choosing, but we took them just as they
came." A cabin which he entered had, he says, the appearance of
wretchedness without, but its interior was misery. The Rev. Mr. Hall, on
putting his head inside the hole which answered for a door, said: "Well,
Phillis, how is your mother to-day?" Phillis answered, "O Sir, is it
you? Mother is dead." Captain Caffin adds--"And there--fearful
reality--was the daughter, a skeleton herself, crouched and crying over
the lifeless body of her mother, which was on the floor, cramped up as
she had died, with her rags and her cloak about her, by the side of a
few embers of peat." They came to the cabin of a poor old woman, the
door of which was stopped up with dung. She roused up, evidently
astonished. They had taken her by surprise. She burst into tears, and
said she had not been able to sleep _since the corpse of the woman had
lain in her bed_.
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