I
trust in God's mercy no harm will come from them." The Very Rev. Dr.
M'Evoy, P.P., writing from Kells, October the 24th, says:--"On my most
minute personal inspection of the state of the potato crop in this most
fertile potato-growing _locale_, is founded my inexpressibly painful
conviction, that one family in twenty of the people will not have a
single potato left on Christmas Day next.... With starvation at our
doors, grimly staring us, vessels laden with our whole hopes of
existence, our provisions, are hourly wafted from our every port. From
one milling establishment I have last night seen no less than fifty
dray-loads of meal moving on to Drogheda, thence to go to feed the
foreigner, leaving starvation and death the soon and certain fate of the
toil and sweat that raised this food."
From other places the accounts were more favourable. "I have found no
field without the disease," writes Mr. Horace Townsend to the _Southern
Reporter_, "but in great variety of degree; in some at least one-third
of the crop is tainted, in others not a tenth, and all the remainder
seems sound as ever." From Athy, Kilkenny, Mayo, Carlow, and Newry, the
accounts were that the disease was partial, and seemed in some cases
arrested.
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