now do for my starving children, since it is gone!” A fortnight earlier a most circumstantial account of the eating of ass flesh is given by a commercial gentleman in a letter addressed to the Premier, Lord John Russell, and dated “Ballina, Christmas-eve.” (!) In this case the poor man killed his ass for food, the skin being sold to a skin dealer for 8d.  The writer of the letter visited the skin dealer’s house, in order to make sure of the fact.  It was quite true, and the skin dealer’s wife told him this could not be a solitary case, “as she never remembered so many asses’ skins coming for sale as within the month just past."[227]

Mr. Forster, in his report to the Society of Friends, says of the condition of Westport in January, 1847, that it was a strange and fearful sight, like what we read of 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 were around the poorhouse, clamouring for soup-tickets; our inn, the head-quarters of the road engineer and pay clerks, was beset by a crowd of beggars for work.[228] The agent of the British Association, Count Strezelecki, writing from Westport at this time, says, no pen could describe the distress by which he was surrounded; it had reached such an extreme degree of intensity that it was above the power of exaggeration.  You may, he adds, believe anything which you hear and read, because what I actually see surpasses what I ever read of past and present calamities.[229]

The weather in March became mild, and even warm and sunny; some little comfort, one would suppose, to those without food or fuel.  But no; they were so starved and weakened and broken down, that it had an injurious effect upon them, and hurried them rapidly to their end.  A week after the passage quoted above was written, Count Strezelecki again writes, and says he is sorry to report that the distress had increased; a thing which could be hardly believed as possible.  Melancholy cases of death on the public roads and in the streets had become more frequent.  The sudden warmth of the weather, and the rays of a bright sun, accelerate prodigiously the forthcoming end of those whose constitutions are undermined by famine or sickness.  “Yesterday,” he writes, “a countrywoman, between this and the harbour (one mile distance), walking with four children, squatted against a wall, on which the heat and light reflected powerfully; some hours after two of her children were corpses, and she and the two remaining ones taken lifeless to the barracks.  To-day, in Westport, similar melancholy occurrences took place."[230]