ins on a donkey
cart. Roscommon--no coffins--600 people in typhus fever in one
Workhouse!--Heroic virtue--The Rosary. Sligo--Forty bodies waiting
for inquests!--Owen Mulrooney--eating asses' flesh. Mayo--Meeting of
the County--Mr. Garvey's statement. Mr. Tuke's experiences--Inquests
given up--W.G.'s letters on Mayo--Effect of Famine on the relations
of landlord and tenant--Extermination of the smaller
tenantry--Evictions--Opinion of an eyewitness--A mother takes leave
of her children--Ass and horse flesh--something more dreadful!
(_Note_). The weather--its effects. Count Strezelecki. Mr. Egan's
account of Westport--Anointing the people in the streets! The
Society of Friends--Accounts given by their agents. Patience of the
people--Newspaper accounts not exaggerated.
Donegal--Dunfanaghy--Glenties--Resident proprietors good and
charitable. Skull--From Cape Clear to Skull--The Capers--Graveyard
of Skull--Ballydehob--The hinged coffin--Famine hardens the heart.
Rev. Traill Hall--Captain Caffin's
narrative--Soup-kitchens--Officials concealing the state of the
people--Provision for burying the dead--The boat's crew at a
funeral. State of Dingle. Father Mathew's evidence.
Bantry--Inquests--Catherine Sheehan--Richard Finn--Labours of the
Priests--Giving a dinner away--Fearful number of deaths--Verdict of
"Wilful murder" against Lord John Russell--The Workhouse at
Bantry--Estimated deaths--The hinged coffin--Shafto Adair's idea of
the Famine.

The year 1846 closed in gloom. It left the Irish people sinking in
thousands into their graves, under the influence of a famine as general
as it was intense, and which trampled down every barrier set up to stay
its desolating progress. But the worst had not yet come. It was in 1847
that the highest point of misery and death had been reached. Skibbereen,
to be sure, ceased to attract so much attention as it had been
previously doing, but the people of that devoted town had received much
relief; besides, there were now fewer mouths to fill there, so many were
closed in death, at the Windmill-hill, in the Workhouse grounds, and in
the churchyard of Abbeystrowry. Instead of one, Ireland had now many
Skibbereens. In short, the greater part of it might be regarded as one
vast Skibbereen. In the Autumn of 1846, the famine, which all saw
advancing, seized upon certain districts of the South and West;