this was done, two rooms, each with four beds, having been provided at Strabane for fever cases; but at no time until the summer of 1817 were they all occupied at once. The epidemic really began there in May, 1817, in a large house which had been occupied during the winter by a number of families from the mountains; they had brought no furniture with them, nor bedding except their blankets, and lay so close together as to cover the floors. Each room was rented at a shilling a week, the tenant of a room making up his rent by taking in beggars at a penny a night. The floors and stairs were covered with the gathered filth of a whole winter; the straw bedding, never renewed, was thrown into a corner during the day to be spread again at night. Every crevice was stopped to keep out the cold; the rain came in through the roof, the floors were damp, and the cellars of the house full of stagnant water turned putrid. Meanwhile more than a fourth part of the families resident in Strabane, to the number of 1026 persons, were being fed from a soup-house opened early in the spring of 1817, while there were others equally destitute but too proud to ask relief. The rumour of this charity soon brought crowds of people from the surrounding country, with gaunt cheeks, says Carleton, hollow eyes, tottering gait and a look of “painful abstraction” from the unsatisfied craving for food. In the crowd round the soup-shop, the timid girl, the modest mother, the decent farmer scrambled “with as much turbulent solicitation and outcry as if they had been trained, since their very infancy, to all the forms of impudent cant and imposture.” These soup-shops were opened in all the Irish towns. At Strabane some of the richer class lent money to procure supplies, for sale at cost price, of oatmeal, rice and rye-flour, the last being in much request in the form of loaves of black bread. The fever, having begun among the houseful of vagrants above mentioned, made slow progress until June, when it spread through the town, and in the autumn became a serious epidemic. Meantime the soup-kitchen was closed, the supplies having ceased, and the country people returned to their cabins carrying the infection of typhus everywhere with them. By the middle of October, 1817, the epidemic was general in the country round Strabane. The following table shows the rise and decline of the epidemic of typhus in the town itself. _Cases of Fever attended from Strabane Dispensary_[471]. 1817 1818 Jan. 9 83 Feb. 13 46 March 6 60 April 13 48 May 3 39 June 10 71 July 60 106 Aug. 206 90 Sept. 287 57 Oct. 233 49 Nov. 193 40 Dec. 140 38