In February 1847, as well as I recollect, the road
works, as they were called, ceased, and I was made
the Chairman of the Local Committee for the distri-
bution of food to the poor in the neighbourhood.
My chief fellow-labourers were the parish priest and
the parson, then, as unhappily is not the case now,
willing to act together in a good work ; and for some
five months we doled out rations of boiled maize to
about three hundred applicants, the average number
upon our lists. The lean and wolfish faces of many
of these are stamped on niy mind even as I write,



THE lEISH FAMINE, 1845-47 97

and but for this relief they would probably have
nearly all perished. Meanwhile hundreds of peasants,
some of the better sort, abandoned their farms, saving
what they could, in order to emigrate to the United
States, and the petty cottars were largely driven
from their homes, for otherwise they could not obtain
food. On our estate, about twenty families out of
seventy disappeared in a few months ; and in the
King's County, as in all parts of Ireland, the great
exodus of the Irish race set in, under conditions that,
even in favoured districts, afflicted all who beheld the
spectacle. The roads were crowded with terrified
human beings, flocking, with their household stuff, to
the nearest port, as if before the march of an invading
army.
