532 A YEAR OF liberty; OB, 



*' Who has not heard of the sufferings of the peasantry of Mayo, 

 where, every three or four years, famine and pestilence do their 

 work ? Look at that wretched hovel (there are many such) ; the 

 roof hardly rises six feet above the level of the moor, and the walls 

 are formed of sods fresh dug from the swamp. It boasts no window ; 

 from its floor, reek exhalations from the bog ; its * bent ' covered roof 

 is pervious to every shower ; and that acre of potatoes forms the sole 

 hope of the miserable inhabitants through the long winter, spring, 

 and early summer. Let the crop fail, as it probably will, and the 

 owner must waste day by day from starvation, till he falls before 

 fever or dysentery. Miserable farming, sour wet lands, and the most 

 uncertain climate in the empire, contribute in this part of Mayo to 

 render a general failure of the crops a matter of frequent occurrence. 

 Then the papers teem with heart-rending details of the inhabitants 

 of an extensive district perishing by hundreds in all the horrors of 

 starvation. 



" ' Why do they not work? ' asks the Englishman. Why? Because 

 there is no work to be had. Can a man support a family from an 

 average of one hundred days' work per annum, at sixpence or eight- 

 pence a day ? Can six or eight human beings be clothed, fed, and 

 pay house-rent on less than three pounds sterling ? The wretched 

 father has but one resource, to till an acre of bog, and ward off 

 death as long as he may ; food of the worst description, and in 

 miserably insufficient quantities ; constant exposure to wet, rags 

 open to every blast, and all those evils uncheered by one ray of hope 

 to brighten the time of trial and suffering. Soon sickness comes ; 

 let its breath be so light as not to shake one petal from the rosy 

 cheek of a well-fed child, it will drag the half-starved sufferer 

 to rest." 



The truth of the above extract struck me forcibly as we rolled 

 towards the Sound of Achil ; not that the country was exactly as 

 it had been when the sketch was drawn, but because sufficient proofs 

 remained to show how correct the remarks must have been when 

 they were written. 



Achil, which during the last quarter of a century has attracted 



