My informant was quite right about my going to Abbeystrowry.  I had already enquired the way to it, and had learned that it was half-a-mile or so beyond Bridgetown.  I wished my interesting informant good evening, and pursued my walk.  Coming to the highest point of the road beyond Bridgetown, a very charming landscape opened before me, made up of the Valley of the Ilen and the agreeably undulating country beyond it.  The river at this place is wide and shallow; but, judging from the noble bridge by which it is spanned, it must be sometimes greatly swollen.  The evening was bright and pleasant; the sun had gone far westward, and the effect of his light, as it played on the scarcely rippled water, and shone through the high empty arches of the bridge, standing like open gateways in the shallow stream, made me pause for a moment, to take in the whole scene.  It was during this time that I discovered, immediately beyond the river, the object of greatest interest to me—­the object, in fact, of my journey—­the churchyard of Abbeystrowry.  There was the spot in which a generation of the people of Skibbereen was buried in a year and a half!  Those places in which poor humanity is laid to rest when life’s work is done have been always regarded as holy ground; cities of the dead, solemn and suggestive.  But this was more; in its lonely seclusion, in its dark and terrible history, it was exciting in its impressiveness.  In the still sunlit evening, wooed to rest, one could imagine, by the gentle murmurs of the Ilen, its little clump of gnarled trees grouped around its scanty ruin was a picture of such complete repose as to make the most thoughtless reflective.  I entered.  Immediately inside the gate, a little to the right, are those monster graves called by the people “the pits,” into which the dead were thrown coffinless in hundreds, without mourning or ceremony—­hurried away by stealth, frequently at the dead of night, to elude observation, and to enable the survivors to attend the public works next day, and thus prolong for awhile their unequal contest with all-conquering Famine.  A difficulty arose in my mind with regard to the manner of interment in those pits.  Great numbers, I knew, were interred in each of them; for which reason they must have been kept open a considerable time.  Yet, surely, I reflected, something resembling interment must have taken place on the arrival of each corpse, especially as it was coffinless.  The contrivance, as I afterwards learned, was simple enough.  A little sawdust was sprinkled over each corpse, on being laid in the pit, which was thus kept open until it had received its full complement of tenants.

To trace one’s steps, slowly and respectfully, among the graves of those who have reached the goal of life in the ordinary course, fills one with holy warnings; to stand beside the monument raised on the battle-field to the brave men who fell there, calls up heroic echoes in the heart, but here there is no room for sentiment; here, in humiliation and sorrow, not unmixed with indignation, one is driven to exclaim:—­