Thus surrounded lay the dying mother, and it was not until the priest had taken in, at more than one view, the whole terrors of this awful scene, that he had time to let his eyes rest upon her countenance and person.
When he did, however, the history, though a fearful one, was, in her case, as indeed in too many, legible at a glance, and may be comprised in one word--starvation.
Father Hanratty was a firm minded man, with a somewhat rough manner, but a heart natural and warm.

After looking upon her face for a few moments, he clasped, his hands closely together, and turning up his eyes to Heaven, he exclaimed: "Great God, guide and support me in this trying scene!" And, indeed, it is not to be wondered at that he uttered such an exclamation.

There lay in the woman's eyes--between her knit and painful eye-brows, over her shrunk upper forehead, upon her sharp cheek-bones, and along the ridge of her thin, wasted nose--there lay upon her skeleton arms, pointed elbows, and long-jointed fingers, a frightful expression, at once uniform and varied, that spoke of gaunt and yellow famine in all its most hideous horrors.

Her eyeballs protruded even to sharpness, and as she glared about her with a half conscious and half-instinctive look, there seemed a fierce demand in her eye that would have been painful, were it not that it was occasionally tamed down into something mournful and imploring, by a recollection of the helpless beings that were about her.

Stripped, as she then was, of all that civilized society presents to a human being on the bed of death--without friends, aid of any kind, comfort, sympathy, or the consolations of religion--she might be truly said to have sunk to the mere condition of animal life--whose uncontrollable impulses had thus left their startling and savage impress upon her countenance, unless, as we have said, when the faint dawn of consciousness threw a softer and more human light into her wild features.
"In the name and in the spirit of God's mercy," asked the priest, "if you have the use of your tongue or voice, tell me what the matter is with you or your children?
Is it sickness or starvation ?" The sound of a human voice appeared to arrest her attention, and rouse her a little.