presented
themselves, the children especially being emaciated with starvation, and
ravenous with hunger. At Carrick-on-Shannon he witnessed what he calls a
most painful and heartrending scene--poor wretches in the last stage of
famine begging to be received into the house; women, who had six or
seven children, imploring that even two or three of them might be taken
in, _as their husbands were earning but 8d. a-day_, which, at the
existing high price of provisions, was totally inadequate to feed them.
Some of those children were worn to skeletons; their features sharpened
with hunger, and their limbs wasted almost to the bone. Of course, he
says, among so many applicants (one hundred and ten), a great number
were necessarily refused admittance, as there were but thirty vacancies
in the house. Although the guardians exercised the best discrimination
they could, it was believed that some of those rejected were so far
spent, that it was doubtful if they could reach their homes alive--those
homes, such as they were, being in many cases five or six Irish miles
away. This kind-hearted gentleman, having expressed a wish to distribute
bread to those poor creatures, that they might not, as he said, "go
quite empty-handed," forty pounds of bread were procured, all that could
be purchased in the town of Carrick-on-Shannon. They devoured it with a
voracity which nothing but famine could produce. One woman, he says, was
observed to eat but a very small portion of her bread; and being asked
the reason, said she had four children at home, to whom she was taking
it, as without it there would not be a morsel of food in her cabin that
night. What struck him and his fellow-traveller in a special manner was
the effects of famine on the children; their faces were so wan and
haggard that they looked like old men and women; their sprightliness was
all gone; they sat in groups at their cabin doors, making no attempt to
play. Another indication of the Famine noticed by them was, that the
pigs and poultry had entirely disappeared. To numberless testimonies, as
to the spirit in which the poor people bore their unexampled privations,
this good man adds his: "To do the poor justice," he writes, "they are
bearing their privations with a remarkable degree of patience and
fortitude, and very little clamorous begging is to be met with upon the
roads--at least, not more than has been the case in Ireland for many
years. William Forster," (his fellow-travell