Next day--a 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.
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