e would venture in. The
neighbours dug a hole in the hard floor of the cabin with a crowbar to
receive their remains. And this was their coffinless grave!

This same priest administered in one day the last Sacrament to
thirty-three young persons in the Workhouse of Westport; and of these
there were not more than two or three alive next morning.

Mr. Egan, who at the date of my visit was Clerk of the Union, held the
same office during the Famine. The Workhouse was built to accommodate
one thousand persons. There were two days a-week for admissions. With
the house crowded far beyond its capacity, he had repeatedly seen as
many as three thousand persons seeking admission on a single day.
Knowing, as we do, the utter dislike the Irish peasantry had in those
times to enter the Workhouse, this is a terrible revelation of the
Famine; for it is a recorded fact that many of the people died of want
in their cabins, and suffered their children to die, rather than go
there. Those who were not admitted--and they were, of course, the great
majority--having no homes to return to, lay down and died in Westport
and its suburbs. Mr. Egan, pointing to the wall opposite the Workhouse
gate, said: "There is where they sat down, never to rise again. I have
seen there of a morning as many as eight corpses of those miserable
beings, who had died during the night. Father G---- (then in Westport)
used to be anointing them as they lay exhausted along the walls and
streets, dying of hunger and fever."[231]

The principal aim of the Society of Friends was to establish
soup-kitchens, and give employment to the women in knitting. As soon as
their committee was in working order, they sent members of their body to
various parts of the country--more especially to the West--to make
inquiries, and to see things with their own eyes. Their reports, made in
a quiet, unexaggerated form, are amongst the most valuable testimonies
extant, as to the effects and extent of the Famine. The delegate who was
the first to explore portions of the West writes that, at Boyle (a
prosperous and important town), the persons who sought admission to the
Workhouse were in a most emaciated state, many of them declaring that
they had not tasted food of any kind for forty-eight hours; and he
learned that numbers of them had been living upon turnips and
cabbage-leaves for weeks. The truth of these statements was but too well
supported by the dreadfully reduced state in which they