the South, must still be
found on the page of Irish history, illustrating the Great Famine of
1847.

The parish of Skull is situated in the barony of West Carberry, county
of Cork, and is very large, containing no less than 84,000 acres. The
town, a small one, is on the shore in the portion of the parish called
East Skull; West Skull runs inland towards Skibbereen, and in this
division is the village of Ballydehob. The town of Skull is built upon a
piece of low level ground, a short distance from which, in the direction
of Ballydehob, there is a chain of hills, the highest of which, Mount
Gabriel, rises 1,300 feet above the sea level. Nothing can be happier or
more accurate than the poet's description of this scenery, when he
writes:--

"The summer sun is falling soft on Carbery's hundred isles,
The summer sun is gleaming still through Gabriel's rough defiles."[237]

A correspondent of the _Southern Reporter_, writing from Ballydehob
during the first days of January, gives the most piteous account of that
village; every house he entered exhibited the same characteristics,--no
clothing, no food, starvation in the looks of young and old. In a
tumble-down cabin resembling a deserted forge, he found a miserable man
seated at a few embers, with a starved-looking dog beside him, that was
not able to crawl. The visitor asked him if he were sick; he answered
that he was not, but having got swelled legs working on the roads, he
had to give up; he had not tasted food for two days; his family had gone
begging about the country, and he had no hope of ever seeing them again.
Efforts were still being made at this place to get coffins for the dead,
but with indifferent success. There were not coffins for half the
people; many were tied up in straw, and so interred. This writer
mentions what he seems to have regarded as an ingenious contrivance of
the Galeen relief committee, namely, the use of the coffin with the
slide or hinged bottom, but such coffins had been, previously used in
other places. He relates a touching incident which occurred at
Ballydehob, at the time of his visit. Two children, the elder only six
years, went into a neighbour's house in search of food. They were asked
where their father was, and they replied that he was asleep for the last
two days. The people became alarmed, and went to his cabin, where they
found him quite dead, and the merest skeleton. The mother of those
children had died some weeks before, and