he
13th of October, from Athlone, this piece of information, intended, he
says, for his Excellency: "On the 11th instant I posted from Dublin to
Banagher. Along the entire line of road I observed the farmyards well
stocked with corn, the crop of the past harvest, unthreshed"--thus
assuming that the four millions of people who lived almost exclusively
on potatoes had such things as farmyards and corn to put in them. In the
same month he writes again to Mr. Trevelyan, that he hears from more
quarters than one that the early potatoes, which were left in the
ground, now prove to be sound. Although small in size, he says, still
from one-third to one-half may be considered available for food. "On my
way here from Athlone," he again writes, "I went into a field where a
man was digging potatoes. The crop looked good, and he told me that it
was an early crop, and that he considered that about half were sound;
and I therefore hope that there is much more food of that description
than the general outcry about famine would lead strangers to suppose."
At the end of December he reports to the Treasury a conversation he had
had with an assistant-engineer from Roscommon, who told him his belief
was, that there were much more provisions in the country than was
generally supposed. He had every day, he said, good potatoes at eight
shillings a cwt. When the disease appeared, the people who held conacres
threw them up, and the potatoes remained undug. Those that were sound
continued so up to the late frost; and the people had, by degrees, been
taking them up. This engineer expected a considerable quantity,
serviceable for food, would be found during the ploughing of the land in
spring.

But the wail of starving millions reached the Lord Lieutenant from
every side, and, in compliance with it, he authorized the "Extraordinary
Baronial Presentment Sessions" to be held. At those sessions the tone of
the speakers was, on the whole, kind and liberal; acknowledging the
universality of the failure of the potato crop, and the necessity of
making immediate provision against its consequences. Sometimes the
presentments for the public works were very large--far beyond the entire
rental of the barony; yet they may not have been too great to meet the
starvation which the assembled ratepayers saw everywhere around them. At
Berehaven, in the County Cork, a place certainly fearfully tried by the
Famine, the presentments at the sessions--at the very first se