y, indeed," he replied, "I suppose more than twice as many."
"And where did they all live--I see no houses where they could have
lived?" "God bless you, sure Bridgetown was twice as big that time as
it is now; the half of it was knocked or fell down, when there were no
people to live in the houses. Besides, great numbers lived out in the
country, all round about here. Come here," he said, earnestly; and we
ascended the road a little space. "Do you see all that country, sir?"
and he pointed towards the north and west of the town. "I do." "Well, it
was all belonging to farmers, and it was full of farmers' houses before
the famine; now you see there are only a couple of gentlemen's places on
the whole of it. The poor all died, and of course their houses were
thrown down." "And where were they all buried," I enquired. "Well, sir,"
he replied, "some of them were buried in the old chapel yard, near the
windmill; a power of them were buried in Abbeystrowry, just out there a
bit, where you are going to, but--" he suddenly added, as if correcting
himself--"sure they were buried everywhere--at the Workhouse over--in
the cabins where they died--everywhere; there was no way, you see, to
bring them all to Abbeystrowry, but still there were a power of them,
sure enough, brought to it."

My informant was quite right about my going to Abbeystrowry. I had
already enquired the way to it, and had learned that it was half-a-mile
or so beyond Bridgetown. I wished my interesting informant good evening,
and pursued my walk. Coming to the highest point of the road beyond
Bridgetown, a very charming landscape opened before me, made up of the
Valley of the Ilen and the agreeably undulating country beyond it. The
river at this place is wide and shallow; but, judging from the noble
bridge by which it is spanned, it must be sometimes greatly swollen. The
evening was bright and pleasant; the sun had gone far westward, and the
effect of his light, as it played on the scarcely rippled water, and
shone through the high empty arches of the bridge, standing like open
gateways in the shallow stream, made me pause for a moment, to take in
the whole scene. It was during this time that I discovered, immediately
beyond the river, the object of greatest interest to me--the object, in
fact, of my journey--the churchyard of Abbeystrowry. There was the spot
in which a generation of the people of Skibbereen was buried in a year
and a half! Those places in which poo