as enough to the
experienced eye--the blight had come. Heat, noontide sun, nothing ever
opened them again. In some days they began to fall off the stems; in
eight or ten days other symptoms appeared, and so began the Potato
Blight of 1850, a mild one, but still the true blight. How like this
fifteenth of July must have been to the nineteenth of August, 1845,
described above by the _Cambridge Chronicle_.

The blight of 1845 was noticed in Ireland about the middle of September.
Like the passage birds, it first appeared on the coast, and, it would
seem, first of all on the coast of Wexford. It soon travelled inland,
and accounts of its alarming progress began to be published in almost
every part of the country. Letters in the daily press from Cork, Tyrone,
Meath, Roscommon, and various other places, gave despairing accounts of
its extent and rapidity. A Meath peasant writes:--"Awful is our story; I
do be striving to _blindfold them_ (the potatoes) in the boiling. I
trust in God's mercy no harm will come from them." The Very Rev. Dr.
M'Evoy, P.P., writing from Kells, October the 24th, says:--"On my most
minute personal inspection of the state of the potato crop in this most
fertile potato-growing _locale_, is founded my inexpressibly painful
conviction, that one family in twenty of the people will not have a
single potato left on Christmas Day next.... With starvation at our
doors, grimly staring us, vessels laden with our whole hopes of
existence, our provisions, are hourly wafted from our every port. From
one milling establishment I have last night seen no less than fifty
dray-loads of meal moving on to Drogheda, thence to go to feed the
foreigner, leaving starvation and death the soon and certain fate of the
toil and sweat that raised this food."

From other places the accounts were more favourable. "I have found no
field without the disease," writes Mr. Horace Townsend to the _Southern
Reporter_, "but in great variety of degree; in some at least one-third
of the crop is tainted, in others not a tenth, and all the remainder
seems sound as ever." From Athy, Kilkenny, Mayo, Carlow, and Newry, the
accounts were that the disease was partial, and seemed in some cases
arrested. But these hopeful accounts had, almost in every instance, to
be contradicted later on. The blight did not appear in all places at
once; it travelled mysteriously but steadily, and from districts where
the crop was safe a few days before, the gloomiest