The Irish people have been so trained by the agitators in the art of deception, that it is almost impossible for those who have not an accurate and perfect knowledge of their objects, and their practices, to fathom their intentions, or to detect their impositions. They are always ready, always prepared, with arrangements to support their statements. Perhaps a better instance to exemplify their disregard of truth, and the lengths they will go to attain their objects, cannot be adduced, than one which we select from a letter of the "_Times_ commissioner," who visited the property of Mr O'Connell. After describing the general wretchedness of the population, this gentleman proceeds--"A little apart from these was the house of T. Sullivan, jun., who, with his twelve children, a sick cow, and two pigs suffering under some grievous malady, occupied the same room. In answer to our enquiries as to his condition, he replied that the food of himself and family all the year round was potatoes and buttermilk. 'Were the potatoes good?' 'Troth they were not--bad as could be,' (and he proved the assertion by cutting open a number of them taken at random from a heap, and showing us the extent of the disease.) 'Had he plenty of potatoes?' 'Indeed he had not.' 'Of milk?' 'Never--nor half enough--never had enough for either dinner or breakfast.' All his children were as badly off as himself--not half enough of potatoes, and often nothing to drink with them, as he could only afford the milk of one stripper for his family.' He had no fish, 'and very little of any thing.' This was the substance of his story, translated to us by an interpreter, Mr Connell; and yet he was a large holder, though his bed was of straw--his cabin falling to pieces--and the mud outside percolating to the interior, where it was trodden into a filthy, adhesive, earthy glue, by the feet and hooves of the semi-naked children, pigs, fowl, and cattle." Now, can there be a more perfect picture of desolation and misery than this man's case presents? Could any rational person raise a doubt as to the truth of the sufferer's representations?--his potatoes were rotten, "and he proved it by taking them _indiscriminately from a heap_." Nothing could be more conclusive--"here there could be no deception"--and the graphic sketch which the talented gentleman drew of this wretched wight, would no doubt have formed the groundwork of many leading articles in the influential journal for which he reported, had he not been undeceived before he had time to forward his dispatch, and _undeceived, too, by no less an authority than Mr Sullivan himself_. At the conclusion of the very letter which contains this harrowing picture, we find the commissioner writing--"Whilst sitting at the hotel at Cahirceveen, Mr Trant, a magistrate of the county, entering the room, informed me that Thomas Sullivan of Aaghenming, whose house I visited on the preceding day, and whose testimony I have already given, was outside, and _wished to make evidence on oath that he had quite misinformed me as to his condition_; in other words, that he was desirous of swearing that he had been telling me lies. Sullivan was called in, and it appeared that he was quite ready to take an affidavit. I took from Mr Trant, who acted as interpreter, the following explanation of Sullivan's previous statements--'_He imagined that I and your commissioner were coming from government to enquire into the state of the potato crop, and he therefore exaggerated the badness of its condition and his own poverty, as much as possible._' He now wished to say, '_That he was not nearly so badly off as he had stated; that he had plenty of potatoes and milk--that he had a bed-tick which was in the loft when we inspected his cottage_.'"[3]