Widow Fitzgerald

Some respectable families in and about Castlebar were doing to their utmost for the poor. Mr. Stoney, the rector, was employing many of them, in spinning, but so isolated were these efforts, that little could be done to stay the plague. Two miles from Castlebar I spent a Sabbath in the family of the widow Fitzgerald, relict of a British officer, who was an English lady from the Isle of Wight, much attached to Ireland. Though the mother of a numerous family, she draws, paints, and plays on the piano, as in the days of her youth. Her spacious drawing-rooms are hung around with elegant specimens of her taste in painting; and then seventy-three years of age she appeared to have lost none of the vigor of intellect which she must have possessed in her youth. A son-in-law, a meek believer, the Protestant curate of the parish, was residing with her, and the whole constituted a family of love and peace, and of the kindest feeling toward the poor.