Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 45, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 July 1875 — A Sad Story. [ARTICLE]

A Sad Story.

A correspondent of the London Times, writing of a small-pox epidemic now raging at Atlienry, says: “ The panic which this scourge spreads wherever it shows its hideous visage has indicated itself in a form not usual in Ireland. Funerals are avoided by the populace to such a degree that, until a suitable mortuary vehicle was provided by the Board of Guardians, mothers were reduced to the bitter' necessity of carrying tlieir children to the grave. I do not recollect that Defoe relates a Similar incident in connection with the great plague of London, but, allowance being made for the humanizing progress of two centuries, the ‘present horror’ is very revolting. A truly mournful instance occurred a few w-eeks since. A woman named Boyle had five children, who, though alw-ays ill fed and poorly clothed, were distinguished among surrounding families by the singular beauty of their features and the bright intelligence beaming from their eyes. Four ol them were stricken by the disease and died, one after another ; and whether it was that her neighbors thought they had done enough in assisting to bury the first two, or that they happened to be accidentally out of the way when she brought out the third for interment, there was no man near to help her. She therefore placed the little coffin on her head and set out unattended

to the Abbey churchyard. But her eldest child, Mary, a girl in florid health and about sixteen years old, who was out at service, seeing her mother pass, rushed out from her master’s house into the street, and seizing the coffin by force bore it away. This was an Irish funeral such as few painters would dream of transferring to their canvas. Yet it is a subject not unworthy of Delaroche or of Holman Hunt. On she went through nearly the w-hole length of this straggling town, while women and children fled before her and ‘ Erin’s sons’ were not visible or apparently within call to redeem the manhood of their town from such a scandal. If any followed they held aloof till she entered the dreary cemetery, and there they ‘ left her alone with her glory.’ For, lamentable spectacle as it was, there was a glory such as might make the angels smile, when that youne - heroine, bowed under her sacred burden, was seen to stumble among multitudinous graves and head-stones till she laid it down fondly and reverently beside the scarcely cold remains of the other children. The saddest part of the tale remains to be told. Returned jaded and breathless to her mother’s door—it would have been useless to present herself at any other door after that open contact with mortality—Mary Boyle sank down upon the threshold with the piteous cry, which was heard in the street, ‘Mother, lam sick.’ Poor child, so she was, sick unto death; and in less than forty-eight hours men were found to carry her over the path which she had trodden alone, and to place her in the same grave with her little brothers and her sister.”