In Wicklow and West Kerry | Page 9

began
talking in a mournful voice of the famines and misfortunes that have
been in Ireland.
'There have been three cruel plagues,' he said, 'out through the country
since I was born in the west. First, there was the big wind in 1839, that
tore away the grass and green things from the earth. Then there was the
blight that came on the 9th of June in the year 1846. Up to then the

potatoes were clean and good; but that morning a mist rose up out of
the sea, and you could hear a voice talking near a mile off across the
stillness of the earth. It was the same the next day, and the day after,
and so on for three days or more; and then you could begin to see the
tops of the stalks lying over as if the life was gone out of them. And
that was the beginning of the great trouble and famine that destroyed
Ireland. Then the people went on, I suppose, in their wickedness and
their animosity of one against the other; and the Almighty God sent
down the third plague, and that was the sickness called the choler. Then
all the people left the town of Sligo--it's in Sligo I was reared--and you
could walk through the streets at the noon of day and not see a person,
and you could knock at one door and another door and find no one to
answer you. The people were travelling out north and south and east,
with the terror that was on them; and the country people were digging
ditches across the roads and driving them back where they could, for
they had great dread of the disease.
'It was the law at that time that if there was sickness on any person in
the town of Sligo you should notice it to the Governors, or you'd be put
up in the gaol. Well, a man's wife took sick, and he went and noticed it.
They came down then with bands of men they had, and took her away
to the sick-house, and he heard nothing more till he heard she was dead,
and was to be buried in the morning. At that time there was such fear
and hurry and dread on every person, they were burying people they
had no hope of, and they with life within them. My man was uneasy a
while thinking on that, and then what did he do, but slip down in the
darkness of the night and into the dead-house, where they were after
putting his wife. There were beyond twoscore bodies, and he went
feeling from one to the other. Then I suppose his wife heard him
coming--she wasn't dead at all--and "Is that Michael?" says she. "It is
then," says he; "and, oh, my poor woman, have you your last gasps in
you still?" "I have, Michael," says she; "and they're after setting me out
here with fifty bodies the way they'll put me down into my grave at the
dawn of day." "Oh, my poor woman," says he; "have you the strength
left in you to hold on my back?" "Oh, Micky," says she, "I have
surely." He took her up then on his back, and he carried her out by
lanes and tracks till he got to his house. Then he never let on a word
about it, and at the end of three days she began to pick up, and in a

month's time she came out and began walking about like yourself or me.
And there were many people were afeard to speak to her, for they
thought she was after coming back from the grave.'
Soon afterwards we passed into a little village, and he turned down a
lane and left me. It was not long, however, till another old man that I
could see a few paces ahead stopped and waited for me, as is the
custom of the place.
'I've been down in Kilpeddar buying a scythe-stone,' he began, when I
came up to him, 'and indeed Kilpeddar is a dear place, for it's
three-pence they charged me for it; but I suppose there must be a profit
from every trade, and we must all live and let live.'
When we had talked a little more I asked him if he had been often in
Dublin.
'I was living in Dublin near ten years,' he said; 'and indeed I don't know
what way I lived that length in it, for there is no place with smells like
the city of Dublin. One time I went up with my wife into those lanes
where they sell old clothing, Hanover Lane and Plunket's Lane, and
when my wife--she's dead now, God forgive her!--when my wife smelt
the dirty