upant could get any person to remove
it. It is not much to be wondered at that she had lost her rest.

"I could," says Captain Caffin, "in this manner take you through thirty
or more cottages that we visited, but they, without exception, were all
alike--the dead and the dying in each; and I could tell you more of the
truth of the heartrending scene, were I to mention the lamentations and
bitter cries of each of those poor creatures, on the threshold of death.
Never in my life have I seen such wholesale misery, nor could I have
thought it so complete. All that I have stated above," he concludes, "I
have seen with my own eyes, and can vouch for the truth of. And I feel I
cannot convey by words the impression left on my mind of this awful
state of things. I could tell you also of that which I could vouch for
the truth of, but which I did not see myself, such as bodies half eaten
by the rats; of two dogs last Wednesday being shot by Mr. O'Callaghan
whilst tearing a body to pieces; of his mother-in-law stopping a poor
woman and asking her what she had on her back, and being replied it was
her son, telling her she would smother it; but the poor emaciated woman
said it was dead already, and she was going to dig a hole in the
churchyard for it. These are things which are of every-day
occurrence."[238]

Taking Ballydehob as a centre, there were, at this time, in a radius of
ten or twelve miles around it, twenty-six soup kitchens--namely, at
Skibbereen, Baltimore, Shirken, and Cape Clear (three); Creagh,
Castlehaven (two); Union Hall, Aghadown (two); Kilcoe (three); Skull
(two); Dunmanus, Crookhaven (two); Cahiragh (two); Durrus, Drimoleague,
Drenagh, Bantry, Glengariff, Adrigoole, Castletown, Berehaven, and
Ballydehob. They were making and distributing daily about seventeen
thousand pints of good meat soup. They did great good, but it was of a
very partial nature. Mr. Commissary Bishop tells us "they were but a
drop in the ocean." Hundreds, he says, are relieved, but thousands still
want. And he adds, that soup kitchens have their attendant evils: an
important one in this instance was, that the poor small farmers were
selling all their cows to the soup kitchens, leaving themselves and
their children without milk or butter.

There seems to have been an understanding among the _employes_, that the
true state of things, in its naked reality, was not to be given in their
communications to Government. It was to be toned down and mo