lose their potatoes and their time in this hopeless undertaking" The answer was, "Plaise God we'll have the potato again." The "potato again," is the last wreck to which they are still clinging.
April 17th.—With a sister of Peter Kelly, I went to "Old Head," and was first introduced into one of the dreadful pauper schools, where ninety children received a piece of black bread once a-day. It was a sad sight, most of them were in a state of rags, bare-footed, and squatted on the floor, waiting for a few ounces of bread, with but here and there a fragment of a book. The clean schoolmaster, on a cold day, was clad in a white vest and linen pantaloons, making the last effort to appear respectable, laboring for the remuneration of a penny a week from each family, if by chance the family could furnish it. These ninety all belonged to Mrs. Garvey's tenantry, and there were others looking on who had come in likewise, not belonging to her lands, who wishfully stood by, without receiving one morsel. I looked till my satiated eyes turned away at a pitiful sight like this. Neither the neat cottage, the old sea, nor my favorite Croagh Patrick, could give satisfaction in a wilderness of woe like this. When will these dreadful scenes find an end?
Naught but desolation and death reigned; and the voice of nature, which was always so pleasant on the sea-coast, now, united with the whistling of the wind, seemed only to be howling in sad response to the moans and entreaties of the starving around me. The "holy well," where the inimitable drawing of the blind girl
