The living awaited death with a
listlessness that was at once tragic and revolting. Women with dead
children in their arms were seen begging for a coffin to bury them.
Beranger has touched a thousand hearts by the picture of _Pauvre
Jacques_, who, when the tax-gatherer came in the King's name, was
discovered dead on his miserable pallet. But at Skibbereen, in the
fruitful County Cork whose seaports were thronged with vessels laden
with corn, cattle, and butter for England, the rate collector told a
more tragic tale. Some houses he found deserted; the owners had been
carried to their graves. In one cabin there was no other occupant than
three corpses; in a once prosperous home a woman and her children had
lain dead and unburied for a week; in the fields a man was discovered so
fearfully mangled by dogs that identification was impossible. The relief
committee of the Society of Friends described the state of the town in
language which it was hard to read with dry eyes. The people were dying
of the unaccustomed food which mocked their prayer for daily bread, and
were carried to the graveyard in a coffin from which the benevolent
strangers who had come to their relief had to drop them, like dead dogs,
that there might be a covering for the next corpse in its turn.
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