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