tal night nearly the whole potato crop over the entire
country blackened, and perished utterly. Then, indeed, followed despair.
Stupor and a sort of moody indifference succeeded to the former buoyancy
and hopefulness. There was nothing to do; no other food was attainable.
The fatal dependence upon a single precarious crop had left the whole
mass of the people helpless before the enemy.

Soon the first signs of famine began to appear. People were to be seen
wandering about; seeking for stray turnips, for watercresses, for
anything that would allay the pangs of hunger. The workhouses, detested
though they were, were crammed until they could hold no single
additional inmate. Whole families perished; men, women, and children lay
down in their cabins and died, often without a sign. Others fell by the
roadside on their way to look for work or seek relief. Only last summer,
at Ballinahinch in Connemara, the present writer was told by an old man
that he remembered being sent by his master on a message to Clifden, the
nearest town, and seeing the people crawling along the road, and that,
returning the same way a few hours later, many of the same people were
lying dead under the walls or upon the grass at the roadside. That this
is no fancy picture is clear from local statistics. No part of Ireland
suffered worse than Galway and Mayo, both far more densely populated
then than at present. In this very region of Connemara an inspector has
left on record, having to give orders for the burying of over a hundred
and thirty bodies found along the roads within his own district.

Mr. W.E. Forster, who, above all other Englishmen deserved the gratitude
of Ireland for his efforts during this tragic time, has left terrible
descriptions of the scenes of which he was himself an eye-witness,
especially in the west. "The town of Westport," he tells us in one of
his reports, "was itself a strange and fearful sight, like what we read
of in beleaguered cities; its streets crowded with gaunt wanderers,
sauntering to and fro with hopeless air and hunger-struck look--a mob of
starved, almost naked women around the poor-house clamouring for
soup-tickets. Our inn, the head-quarters of the road engineer and pay
clerks, beset by a crowd of beggars for work." In another place "the
survivors," he says, "were like walking skeletons--the men gaunt and
haggard, stamped with the livid mark of hunger; the children crying with
pain; the women in some of the cabi