The South and West were the portions of the country in which the Famine committed its earliest ravages; but before the close of 1846 considerable parts of Leinster and Ulster were invaded by it, and deaths from starvation began to be recorded in those comparatively wealthy provinces.  In Maryborough, a man named William Fitzpatrick died of starvation in the beginning of December.  He and his family were for a considerable time in a state of destitution.  He tried to earn or obtain food for them, but without success.  At the inquest, his wife said that, when she pressed him to eat such scanty food as they could occasionally procure, he often said to her, “Eat it yourself and the children.”  A kind neighbour, having heard how badly off this poor family was, gave an order for some bread; but, as occurred in so many cases, this act of Christian charity came too late.  Fitzpatrick was unable to eat, and so he died.  At Enniskillen, a poor girl, who had been sent for Indian meal, fell down near her dwelling and expired.  She had not gone out more than eight or nine minutes, when she was discovered lifeless, and clutching a small parcel of Indian meal tied up in a piece of cloth.  In parts of Ulster, the applications for employment on the Government works were very numerous; in one parish alone (Ballynascreen) there were sixteen hundred such applications.  In West Innishowen, within twelve miles of Londonderry, twelve persons died of starvation in one week.

Thus had the great Famine seized upon the four Provinces before the end of 1846; Munster and Connaught, however, enduring sufferings which, in their amount and terrible effects, were unknown to Leinster or Ulster.  In the West, Mayo, up to this time, had suffered most, which, from its previously known state of destitution, was to be expected; in the South, Cork seems to have been the county most extensively and most fatally smitten.  This, however, may not have been actually the case.  Clare and Kerry suffered greatly from the very beginning, but their sufferings were not brought so prominently before the public as those of Cork.  This county had many and faithful chroniclers of her wants and afflictions—­a fact especially true of Skibbereen.  That devoted town and its neighbourhood were amongst the earliest, if not the very earliest, of the famine-scourged districts; and their story was well and feelingly told by special correspondents, and, above all, by Dr. Donovan, the principal local physician, whose duties placed him in the midst of the sufferers.  There can be no doubt that even at this comparatively early period of the famine, parts of Connaught, especially Mayo, suffered as much as Skibbereen, but the results were commonly told in briefer terms than in parts of the South.  “More deaths from starvation in Mayo;” “Dreadful destitution in Mayo;” “Coroners’ inquests in Mayo.”  Such are the headings of brief but suggestive paragraphs, during the latter part of November, and all through December.  Many