My wife well remembers another case.  One day her mother emerged from a cabin carrying what looked like a big bundle of clothes.  It was the form of an emaciated woman, whose four children and husband had all starved.  My mother-in-law took her to her own house, fed her at first with spoonsful of soup, and kept her there until she had rebuilt her once vigorous constitution.

My wife subsequently recollects her as a hale, buxom, young widow coming to say good-bye before emigrating to America.

Very soon all the coffins had been exhausted, and in many places the dead were taken to the graves and dropped in through the hinged bottom of a trap-coffin.

After soup had been introduced, Indian meal stirabout proved efficacious, and it was distributed from large iron boilers set up by the roadside to the gaunt, cadaverous wretches who scuffled for the sustenance.

Even more terrible than those privations was the fever which supervened.  Apart from the lack of food, a great cause of mortality lay in the change of diet.  Potatoes form a bulky article of food, and stirabout, unless very carefully made, used to swell after it was consumed.  Many, too, ate raw turnips from sheer destitution, and these also caused swelling of the stomach as well as a dysentery almost always fatal in a few days.

Numbers of starving Catholics had gone to Protestant clergymen and offered to become converts in return for food, and when some of these sickened with the fever, the priests declared it was a judgment on them, and religious hostility became intensified.

At Dingle Lady Ventry and her helpers were denounced from the pulpits as ’benevolent sisters bent on superising the poor’—­to superise being the improvised verb for Protestantising, a thing they decidedly did not attempt.

A very early instance of the open-air cure never before recorded took place at Lismore.  When every possible place in the hospital had been filled with fever patients, a number had to be lodged in a disused quarry near the Blackwater, and of the latter not a single sufferer died, though the mortality within doors was excessive.

I remember one rather quaint incident.

A large amount of sea biscuit was brought into a house for distribution by a benevolent gentleman.  His daughter, aged seven, surreptitiously stole a biscuit for the purpose of eating it.  But at the first attempt to bite the tough thing, out came a loose tooth.  She howled with fright, thinking it a judgment on her for her misdeed, and went in tears to tell her mother.

I have always hoped the latter had enough sense of humour to laugh at the incident, but my shrewd suspicion is that she improved the occasion—­an error for which there is always temptation, and on which there is often the retribution of the few words having the opposite effect to that intended.