st completely annihilated--in the far west--the Famine first appeared,
but other quarters were also invaded, as the remnant of the crop became
blighted or consumed. Hence, in localities, which until recently but
slightly participated in this afflictive visitation, distress and
destitution are now spreading, and the accounts from some of these are
presenting the same features of appalling misery as those which
originally burst upon an affrighted nation from the neighbourhood of
Skibbereen." In the postscript of a letter to the _Cork Examiner_, Rev.
James O'Driscoll, P.P., writing from Kilmichael, says: "Since writing
the above a young man named Manley, in fever at Cooldorahey, had to be
visited. He was found in a dying state, without one to tend him. _His
sister and brother lay dead quite close to him in the same room. The
sister was dead for five days, and the brother for three days_. He also
died, being the last of a large family. The three were interred by means
of a sliding coffin."

The Cork Workhouse was crowded to excess, and the number of deaths in
it, at this time, was simply frightful: they were one hundred and
seventy-four in a single week--more than one death in every hour.[214]
In one day, in the beginning of February, there were forty-four corpses
in the house; and on the 10th of that month one hundred bodies were
conveyed for interment to a small suburban burial place near Cork.
Several persons were found dead in the streets; numbers of bodies were
left unburied for want of coffins. Under a shed at the Shandon
guard-house lay some thirty-eight human beings; old and young, men,
women, and infants of tenderest age, huddled together like so many pigs
or dogs, on the ground, without any covering but the rags on their
persons.[215]

The _Limerick Examiner_, in giving an account of the state of the poor
in that city, publishes a day's experience of one of the Catholic
priests in the Parish of St. John. In one day he was called to officiate
at the death-beds of seven persons who were dying of starvation, the
families of which they were members comprising, in all, twenty-three
souls. The wretched abodes in which he found them were much of the same
character--no beds, scarcely any clothing, no food, the children quite
naked. In one of those miserable dwellings he could not procure a light,
to be used whilst administering the Sacraments to a dying woman; and
such was the general poverty around, that _the loan of a