still, oppressive, sultry, electric sort of day—­I, in company with some others, visited various potato fields.  There was but one symptom that the blight had come; all the blossoms were closed, even at mid-day:  this was enough to the experienced eye—­the blight had come.  Heat, noontide sun, nothing ever opened them again.  In some days they began to fall off the stems; in eight or ten days other symptoms appeared, and so began the Potato Blight of 1850, a mild one, but still the true blight.  How like this fifteenth of July must have been to the nineteenth of August, 1845, described above by the Cambridge Chronicle.

The blight of 1845 was noticed in Ireland about the middle of September.  Like the passage birds, it first appeared on the coast, and, it would seem, first of all on the coast of Wexford.  It soon travelled inland, and accounts of its alarming progress began to be published in almost every part of the country.  Letters in the daily press from Cork, Tyrone, Meath, Roscommon, and various other places, gave despairing accounts of its extent and rapidity.  A Meath peasant writes:—­“Awful is our story; I do be striving to blindfold them (the potatoes) in the boiling.  I trust in God’s mercy no harm will come from them.”  The Very Rev. Dr. M’Evoy, P.P., writing from Kells, October the 24th, says:—­“On my most minute personal inspection of the state of the potato crop in this most fertile potato-growing locale, is founded my inexpressibly painful conviction, that one family in twenty of the people will not have a single potato left on Christmas Day next....  With starvation at our doors, grimly staring us, vessels laden with our whole hopes of existence, our provisions, are hourly wafted from our every port.  From one milling establishment I have last night seen no less than fifty dray-loads of meal moving on to Drogheda, thence to go to feed the foreigner, leaving starvation and death the soon and certain fate of the toil and sweat that raised this food.”

From other places the accounts were more favourable.  “I have found no field without the disease,” writes Mr. Horace Townsend to the Southern Reporter, “but in great variety of degree; in some at least one-third of the crop is tainted, in others not a tenth, and all the remainder seems sound as ever.”  From Athy, Kilkenny, Mayo, Carlow, and Newry, the accounts were that the disease was partial, and seemed in some cases arrested.  But these hopeful accounts had, almost in every instance, to be contradicted later on.  The blight did not appear in all places at once; it travelled mysteriously but steadily, and from districts where the crop was safe a few days before, the gloomiest accounts were unexpectedly received.  The special correspondent of a Dublin newspaper, writing from the West, explains this when he says:  “The disease appeared suddenly, and the tubers are sometimes rotten in twenty-four hours afterwards."[60]