When we enquired how it was that they did not
bury them, a woman told us that they did not know, and that one of them
had been dead for five days. As we were coming down to the boat, we told
the boat's crew if they wanted to see a sight, to go up the street. When
they went, there were four men with hand-barrows there, and the men
belonging to the boats helped to carry the corpses to the burial ground,
where they dug holes, and put them in without coffins."
At this period of the Famine, things had come to such a pass, that
individual cases of death from starvation were seldom reported, and when
they were they failed to attract much attention, deaths by wholesale had
become so common. To be sure, when Dr. Crowley wrote from Skibbereen
that himself and Dr. Donovan had interred, in a kitchen garden, the
corpse of a person eleven days dead, the case, being somewhat peculiar,
had interest enough to be made public; but an ordinary death from hunger
would be deemed a very ordinary affair indeed. I will here give a
specimen or two, of the way in which the progress of the Famine was
chronicled at the close of 1846, and through the winter and spring of
1847. The correspondent of the _Kerry Examiner_, writing from Dingle
under date of February the 8th says: "The state of the people of this
locality is horrifying.
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