of the Treasury.  And indeed, it must be said, well meant and practical they were.  The first was, to send two half-pay medical officers to Skull, to try and do something for the sick, many of whom were dying for want of the commonest care; and also to combine with that arrangement, the means of securing the decent interment of the dead.  The second proposal was to provide carts, for the conveyance of soup to the sick in their houses in and around Skull; a most necessary provision, inasmuch as the starving people were, in numerous cases, unable to walk from their dwellings to the soup kitchen; besides which, in many houses the whole family were struck down by a combination of fever, starvation and dysentery.  Sir John Burgoyne, as might be expected, picked holes in both proposals.  In the carriage of soup to the sick Sir John sees difficulty on account of the scarcity of horses, which are, he says, diminishing fast.  And he adds, that several, if not all of the judges, who were then proceeding on circuit, were obliged to take the same horses from Dublin throughout, as they would have no chance of changing them as usual.  Then with regard to the decent burial of the dead, Sir John thought there were legal difficulties in the way, and that legislation was necessary before it could be done.  He failed to produce any objection against the appointment of the medical officers.  In a fortnight after, a Treasury Minute was issued to the effect that Relief Committees should be required to employ proper persons to bury, with as much attention to the feelings of the survivors as circumstances would admit, the dead bodies which could not be buried by any other means.  How urgently such an order was called for appears from the fact, that at that time in the neighbourhood of Skull, none but strangers, hired by the clergy, could be found to take any part in a burial.[239]

The incumbent of Skull, the Key.  Robert Traill Hall,[240] a month after Captain Caffin’s letter was published, says, “the distress was nothing in Captain Caffin’s time compared with what it is now.”  On reading Captain Caffin’s letter, one would suppose, that destitution could not reach a higher point than the one at which he saw it.  That letter fixed the attention of the Government upon Skull, and yet, strange result, after a month of such attention, the Famine is intensified there, instead of being alleviated.

Mr. Commissary Bishop had charge of the most famine-visited portion of the Co.  Cork (Skibbereen always excepted), including West Carbery, Bantry and Bere.  He seems to have been an active, intelligent officer, and a kind-hearted man; yet his communications, somehow, must have misled the Government, for Mr. Trevelyan starts at Captain Caffin’s letter, as if suddenly awakened from a dream.  Its contents appeared to be quite new, and almost incredible to him.  No wonder, perhaps.  On the 29th of January, a fortnight before the publication of Captain Caffin’s letter,