ns too weak to stand. When there
before I had seen cows at almost every cabin, and there were besides
many sheep and pigs owned in the village. But now the sheep were all
gone--all the cows, all the poultry killed--only one pig left; the very
dogs which had barked at me before had disappeared--no potatoes;
no oats."

One more extract more piteous even than the rest: "As we went along our
wonder was not that the people died, but that they lived; and I have no
doubt whatever that in any other country the mortality would have been
far greater; that many lives have been prolonged, perhaps saved, by the
long apprenticeship to want in which the Irish peasant had been trained,
and by that lovely touching charity which prompts him to share his
scanty meal with his starving neighbour."

Of course all this time there was no lack of preventative measures.
Large sums had been voted from the Treasury; stores of Indian corn
introduced; great relief works set on foot. An unfortunate fatality
seemed, however, to clog nearly all these efforts. Either they proved
too late to save life, or in some way or other to be unsuitable to the
exigencies of the case. Individual charity, too, came out upon the most
magnificent scale. All Europe contributed, and English gold was poured
forth without stint or stay. Still the famine raged almost unchecked.
The relief works established by the Government, with the best intentions
possible, too often were devoted to the most curiously useless,
sometimes even to actually harmful, objects. To this day "Famine roads"
may be met with in the middle of snipe bogs, or skirting precipices
where no road was ever wanted or could possibly be used. By the time,
too, they were in full working order the people were, in many cases, too
enfeebled by want and disease to work. For close upon the heels of the
famine followed an epidemic hardly less fatal than itself. In the course
of the two years that it raged over two hundred thousand people are said
to have perished from this cause alone, and three times the number to
have been attacked and permanently enfeebled by it.

In 1849 a Relief Act was passed which established soup kitchens
throughout the unions, where food was to be had gratis by all who
required it. Long before this similar kitchens had been privately set on
foot, and men and women had devoted themselves to the work with untiring
energy and the most absolute self-devotedness. Of these self-appointed
and unp