Further on, as I was going up a long hill, an old man with a white,
pointed face and heavy beard pulled himself up out of the ditch and
joined me. We spoke first about the broken weather, and then he
began talking in a mournful voice of the famines and misfortunes
that have been in Ireland.

'There have been three cruel plagues,' he said, 'out through the
country since I was born in the west. First, there was the big wind
in 1839, that tore away the grass and green things from the earth.
Then there was the blight that came on the 9th of June in the year
1846. Up to then the potatoes were clean and good; but that morning
a mist rose up out of the sea, and you could hear a voice talking
near a mile off across the stillness of the earth. It was the same
the next day, and the day after, and so on for three days or more;
and then you could begin to see the tops of the stalks lying over as
if the life was gone out of them. And that was the beginning of the
great trouble and famine that destroyed Ireland. Then the people
went on, I suppose, in their wickedness and their animosity of one
against the other; and the Almighty God sent down the third plague,
and that was the sickness called the choler. Then all the people
left the town of Sligo--it's in Sligo I was reared--and you could
walk through the streets at the noon of day and not see a person,
and you could knock at one door and another door and find no one to
answer you. The people were travelling out north and south and east,
with the terror that was on them; and the country people were
digging ditches across the roads and driving them back where they
could, for they had great dread of the disease.

'It was the law at that time that if there was sickness on any
person in the town of Sligo you should notice it to the Governors,