of Erris, that he had visited the wasted remnants of the once noble Red Man in North America, and the "negro-quarter" of the degraded and enslaved African; but never had he seen misery so intense, or physical degradation so complete, as among the dwellers in the bog-holes of Erris.
"Figure and mien, complexion and attire,
Are leagued to strike dismay."
The few resident landlords in this barony, containing in the year 1846, a population of twenty-eight thousand, were now reduced, by the extreme poverty of the tenantry, to a state of almost hopeless desperation. The poor-house was a distance of forty miles to Ballina; and the population since the famine was reduced to twenty thousand—ten thousand of these on the extreme borders of starvation—crawling about the streets—lying under the windows of such as had a little food, in a state of almost nudity. Being situated on the north-east coast of Mayo, it has the Atlantic roaring and dashing upon two sides of it; and where the wretched dwellers of its coasts are hunting for seaweed, sand-eels, &c, to appease their hunger, and where in many cases, I truly thought that man had nearly lost the image in which he was created. This coast is noted for shipwrecks; and many of the inhabitants, in former days, have subsisted very comfortably upon the spoils.
A Mrs. D. called one morning to take a walk with me upon a part of the sea-coast, called "Cross."
