The principal aim of the Society of Friends was to establish soup-kitchens, and give employment to the women in knitting.  As soon as their committee was in working order, they sent members of their body to various parts of the country—­more especially to the West—­to make inquiries, and to see things with their own eyes.  Their reports, made in a quiet, unexaggerated form, are amongst the most valuable testimonies extant, as to the effects and extent of the Famine.  The delegate who was the first to explore portions of the West writes that, at Boyle (a prosperous and important town), the persons who sought admission to the Workhouse were in a most emaciated state, many of them declaring that they had not tasted food of any kind for forty-eight hours; and he learned that numbers of them had been living upon turnips and cabbage-leaves for weeks.  The truth of these statements was but too well supported by the dreadfully reduced state in which they presented themselves, the children especially being emaciated with starvation, and ravenous with hunger.  At Carrick-on-Shannon he witnessed what he calls a most painful and heartrending scene—­poor wretches in the last stage of famine begging to be received into the house; women, who had six or seven children, imploring that even two or three of them might be taken in, as their husbands were earning but 8d. a-day, which, at the existing high price of provisions, was totally inadequate to feed them.  Some of those children were worn to skeletons; their features sharpened with hunger, and their limbs wasted almost to the bone.  Of course, he says, among so many applicants (one hundred and ten), a great number were necessarily refused admittance, as there were but thirty vacancies in the house.  Although the guardians exercised the best discrimination they could, it was believed that some of those rejected were so far spent, that it was doubtful if they could reach their homes alive—­those homes, such as they were, being in many cases five or six Irish miles away.  This kind-hearted gentleman, having expressed a wish to distribute bread to those poor creatures, that they might not, as he said, “go quite empty-handed,” forty pounds of bread were procured, all that could be purchased in the town of Carrick-on-Shannon.  They devoured it with a voracity which nothing but famine could produce.  One woman, he says, was observed to eat but a very small portion of her bread; and being asked the reason, said she had four children at home, to whom she was taking it, as without it there would not be a morsel of food in her cabin that night.  What struck him and his fellow-traveller in a special manner was the effects of famine on the children; their faces were so wan and haggard that they looked like old men and women; their sprightliness was all gone; they sat in groups at their cabin doors, making no attempt to play.  Another indication of the Famine noticed by them was, that the pigs and poultry had entirely