too, ate raw turnips from sheer destitution, and these also caused
swelling of the stomach as well as a dysentery almost always fatal in a
few days.

Numbers of starving Catholics had gone to Protestant clergymen and
offered to become converts in return for food, and when some of these
sickened with the fever, the priests declared it was a judgment on them,
and religious hostility became intensified.

At Dingle Lady Ventry and her helpers were denounced from the pulpits as
'benevolent sisters bent on superising the poor'--to superise being the
improvised verb for Protestantising, a thing they decidedly did not
attempt.

A very early instance of the open-air cure never before recorded took
place at Lismore. When every possible place in the hospital had been
filled with fever patients, a number had to be lodged in a disused
quarry near the Blackwater, and of the latter not a single sufferer
died, though the mortality within doors was excessive.

I remember one rather quaint incident.

A large amount of sea biscuit was brought into a house for distribution
by a benevolent gentleman. His daughter, aged seven, surreptitiously
stole a biscuit for the purpose of eating it. But at the first attempt
to bite the tough thing, out came a loose tooth. She howled with fright,
thinking it a judgment on her for her misdeed, and went in tears to tell
her mother.

I have always hoped the latter had enough sense of humour to laugh at
the incident, but my shrewd suspicion is that she improved the
occasion--an error for which there is always temptation, and on which
there is often the retribution of the few words having the opposite
effect to that intended.

The conduct of the landlords during the famine and fever has been much
discussed and variously represented. But many of the Nationalists
themselves have declared that the diatribes of their comrades have been
thoroughly undeserved. Absenteeism apart--for which no excuse need be
attempted--the Irish landlords did their best, gave of their substance,
and imperilled their own lives for the sake of the sufferers. Mr.
Richard White of Inchiclogh, near Bantry, fell a victim to the fever.
Two other landlords who gave their lives for others were Mr. Richard
Martin, M.P., and Mr. Nolan of Ballinderry. The conditions of tenure did
not admit of lavish financial generosity, but as one of their sharpest
critics in later times admitted, the vast majority 'went down with the
ship.'

The sur