ese places when there is rain in the air.

Further on, as I was going up a long hill, an old man with a white,
pointed face and heavy beard pulled himself up out of the ditch and
joined me. We spoke first about the broken weather, and then he
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 t