may be met with in the middle of snipe bogs, or skirting precipices where no road was ever wanted or could possibly be used.  By the time, too, they were in full working order the people were, in many cases, too enfeebled by want and disease to work.  For close upon the heels of the famine followed an epidemic hardly less fatal than itself.  In the course of the two years that it raged over two hundred thousand people are said to have perished from this cause alone, and three times the number to have been attacked and permanently enfeebled by it.

In 1849 a Relief Act was passed which established soup kitchens throughout the unions, where food was to be had gratis by all who required it.  Long before this similar kitchens had been privately set on foot, and men and women had devoted themselves to the work with untiring energy and the most absolute self-devotedness.  Of these self-appointed and unpaid workers a large number shared the fate of those whom they assisted.  Indeed, it is one of the most singular features of the time that not only old, or feeble, or specially sensitive people died, but strong men, heads of houses—­not regarded as by any means specially soft-hearted—­raised, too, by circumstances out of reach of actual hunger, died—­just as O’Connell had died—­of sheer distress of mind, and the effort to cope with what was beyond the power of any human being to cope with.  In the single county of Galway the records of the times show—­as may easily be verified—­an extraordinary number of deaths of this type, a fact which alone goes far to disprove those accusations of heartlessness and indifference which have in some instances been too lightly flung.

After the famine followed ruin—­a ruin which swept high and low alike into its net.  When the poor rate rose to twenty and twenty-five shillings in the pound it followed that the distinction between rich and poor vanished, and there were plenty of instances of men, accounted well off, who had subscribed liberally to others at the beginning of the famine, who were themselves seeking relief before the end.  The result was a state of things which has left bitterer traces behind it than even the famine itself.  The smaller type of landowners, who for the most part had kindly relations with their tenants, were swept away like leaves before the great storm, their properties fell to their creditors, and were sold by order of the newly established Encumbered Estates Courts.  No proposing purchaser would have anything to say to estates covered with a crowd of pauper tenants, and the result was a wholesale clearance, carried out usually by orders given by strangers at a distance, and executed too often with a disregard of humanity that it is frightful to read or to think of.  Most of the people thus ejected in the end emigrated, and that emigration was under the circumstances their best hope few can reasonably doubt.  Even here, however, misfortune pursued them.  Sanitary inspection