"Behind the fragments of the last fortress beseiged by Cromwell in Ireland stands the village of Killanny with its hundred huts. It is the fishing centre of Arran, and every hut there is a fisherman's home.

"Though its inhabitants, poor fellows, point out the stone in those battlements against which Cromwell's nose was rubbed in a brief defeat, and boast of his final repulse from their walls, still worse than all, Cromwell's curse, we fear, remains.

"Nothing else could bring on the people such want and cold and nakedness as we witnessed. No later than today we walked through the village and saw children entirely—this is true—entirely, absolutely naked, gathering themselves around their poor old granny in the corner where the fire used to be.

"Arran grows neither turf nor timber. Fuel is supplied from Connemara, many miles distant, over one of the wildest seas around the Irish Coast,; and if Connemara and the whole West coast is itself in a partial fuel famine, what must inaccessible Arran be?

"We will give one instance. There are a few boats being made down on the shore, and it is really piercing to see those naked little creatures in the raw morning air, now standing on one foot and now on the other, watching the first chip that falls from the boat wright's axe.

"Would that those rich and charitable parents, whose own happy children play perhaps about them in joy whilst those lines are being noted, could see with their own eyes, in this painful condition, those shivering little ones, and the eloquence of their want would not plead in vain.

"Returning to the house where we left the old woman and the naked children depending, Berkeley-like, on their imagination for heat at the quenched hearth, we find a strong man, idle and careworn, leaning against the black side-wall. After commenting mournfully on his own and his children's condition, he says, 'There are thirty men like myself in Killanny; we are too poor to get anyone to bail us for the fishery money. The people who want money most in those bad times won't get any from the Government Offices, but if we had one pound, each of us, to buy a Spilliard we'd try to put a fagot of clothes on the children, a spark on the hearth, and a bit in our mouths, with the help of God.'

"Thinking as we came away on the best mode of seeking succour for this deserving man, we said we will venture to write first to the three great Relief Funds, and we are sure they will not grudge to spend £10 each on a charity of this kind. These £30 would place the thirty wasting Killanny men in reproductive works.

"I will give them a chance of gathering, as they say, the riches that are waiting for them at the bottom of the deep.