the people crawling along the road, and that, returning the same way a few hours later, many of the same people were lying dead under the walls or upon the grass at the roadside.  That this is no fancy picture is clear from local statistics.  No part of Ireland suffered worse than Galway and Mayo, both far more densely populated then than at present.  In this very region of Connemara an inspector has left on record, having to give orders for the burying of over a hundred and thirty bodies found along the roads within his own district.

Mr. W.E.  Forster, who, above all other Englishmen deserved the gratitude of Ireland for his efforts during this tragic time, has left terrible descriptions of the scenes of which he was himself an eye-witness, especially in the west.  “The town of Westport,” he tells us in one of his reports, “was itself a strange and fearful sight, like what we read of in beleaguered cities; its streets crowded with gaunt wanderers, sauntering to and fro with hopeless air and hunger-struck look—­a mob of starved, almost naked women around the poor-house clamouring for soup-tickets.  Our inn, the head-quarters of the road engineer and pay clerks, beset by a crowd of beggars for work.”  In another place “the survivors,” he says, “were like walking skeletons—­the men gaunt and haggard, stamped with the livid mark of hunger; the children crying with pain; the women in some of the cabins too weak to stand.  When there before I had seen cows at almost every cabin, and there were besides many sheep and pigs owned in the village.  But now the sheep were all gone—­all the cows, all the poultry killed—­only one pig left; the very dogs which had barked at me before had disappeared—­no potatoes; no oats.”

One more extract more piteous even than the rest:  “As we went along our wonder was not that the people died, but that they lived; and I have no doubt whatever that in any other country the mortality would have been far greater; that many lives have been prolonged, perhaps saved, by the long apprenticeship to want in which the Irish peasant had been trained, and by that lovely touching charity which prompts him to share his scanty meal with his starving neighbour.”

Of course all this time there was no lack of preventative measures.  Large sums had been voted from the Treasury; stores of Indian corn introduced; great relief works set on foot.  An unfortunate fatality seemed, however, to clog nearly all these efforts.  Either they proved too late to save life, or in some way or other to be unsuitable to the exigencies of the case.  Individual charity, too, came out upon the most magnificent scale.  All Europe contributed, and English gold was poured forth without stint or stay.  Still the famine raged almost unchecked.  The relief works established by the Government, with the best intentions possible, too often were devoted to the most curiously useless, sometimes even to actually harmful, objects.  To this day “Famine roads”