At this time I
find the Secretary of the Mallow Relief Committee, the Rev. C.B. Gibson,
calling the urgent attention of the Commissioners of Relief, in Dublin
Castle, to the state of his district, and his facts may be taken as a
fair specimen of the state of a great portion of the country at the
moment. He had just made a house-to-house visitation of the portion of
the country over which the operations of his committee extended, and he
says, the people were already starving, their only food being potatoes
no larger than marbles, the blight having stopped their growth. He took
some of the best of those potatoes to his house, and found that twelve
of them weighed just four ounces and a-half--merely the weight of one
very ordinary sized full-grown potato. They sickened the people instead
of satisfying their hunger. In many places the children were kept in bed
for want of clothing, as also to enable them to silence, to some extent,
the pangs of hunger; some of them had not had any food for a day and
a-half. And such beds as those starving children had! Of many he
describes one. It consisted of a heap of stones built up like a
blacksmith's fire-place, (these are his words), with a little hay spread
over it; bed clothes there were none.
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