after communications adopts the very opposite tone.  He writes to Mr. Under-Secretary Redington[144] on the 13th of October, from Athlone, this piece of information, intended, he says, for his Excellency:  “On the 11th instant I posted from Dublin to Banagher.  Along the entire line of road I observed the farmyards well stocked with corn, the crop of the past harvest, unthreshed”—­thus assuming that the four millions of people who lived almost exclusively on potatoes had such things as farmyards and corn to put in them.  In the same month he writes again to Mr. Trevelyan, that he hears from more quarters than one that the early potatoes, which were left in the ground, now prove to be sound.  Although small in size, he says, still from one-third to one-half may be considered available for food.  “On my way here from Athlone,” he again writes, “I went into a field where a man was digging potatoes.  The crop looked good, and he told me that it was an early crop, and that he considered that about half were sound; and I therefore hope that there is much more food of that description than the general outcry about famine would lead strangers to suppose.”  At the end of December he reports to the Treasury a conversation he had had with an assistant-engineer from Roscommon, who told him his belief was, that there were much more provisions in the country than was generally supposed.  He had every day, he said, good potatoes at eight shillings a cwt.  When the disease appeared, the people who held conacres threw them up, and the potatoes remained undug.  Those that were sound continued so up to the late frost; and the people had, by degrees, been taking them up.  This engineer expected a considerable quantity, serviceable for food, would be found during the ploughing of the land in spring.

But the wail of starving millions reached the Lord Lieutenant from every side, and, in compliance with it, he authorized the “Extraordinary Baronial Presentment Sessions” to be held.  At those sessions the tone of the speakers was, on the whole, kind and liberal; acknowledging the universality of the failure of the potato crop, and the necessity of making immediate provision against its consequences.  Sometimes the presentments for the public works were very large—­far beyond the entire rental of the barony; yet they may not have been too great to meet the starvation which the assembled ratepayers saw everywhere around them.  At Berehaven, in the County Cork, a place certainly fearfully tried by the Famine, the presentments at the sessions—­at the very first sessions held in the barony—­were said to be quadruple the rental of the entire barony!  This, however, was only one district of the largest Irish county; but the presentments for the whole County of Mayo, the most famine-stricken, to be sure, of all the counties, are worth remembering; and so is their explanation.  They were forwarded to the Board of Works by the County Surveyor.  The number of square miles in the county are given at 2,132,