found themselves with three hundred thousand pounds at their disposal (forty-four thousand of it from Ireland), while a fund at the Dublin Mansion House amounted to thirty thousand more. Much of this was sent to Galway, Mayo, Clare and Kerry, in time to save many thousands of families from starvation[480]; it was, no doubt, wastefully given away, and there was a balance of sixty thousand pounds sterling unused. More tardily in June, 1822, Parliament voted one hundred thousand “for the employment of the poor in Ireland,” and in July two hundred thousand to meet contingencies of the famine. It was generally admitted that the Government grants were jobbed and misappropriated to a scandalous extent. The towns had to be made the centres of relief and the depôts of provisions; and yet the towns were not suffering from famine or fever but only from penury. The fever hospital at Ennis, the county town of Clare, was constantly filled by strangers, the townspeople remaining healthy. Kerry was one of the most afflicted counties, but Tralee and Killarney had no unusual sickness. Limerick town had hardly more fever than in an ordinary year. In Dublin the admissions for fever in 1822 were a good deal below the usual number. On the other hand, Sligo town had much fever, and Galway town had an altogether unique experience, the history of which, as related by Dr Graves, will be the best possible view of the peculiar circumstances of 1821-22[481]. In Connemara, where the distress was acute, there were no roads over which the provisions from England could be carted to the famished districts. Accordingly a great store was made in Galway, to which crowds flocked from the country in boats and on foot. Many died a few days after they arrived, from exhaustion or from the surfeit of food after long hunger. Galway, a crowded place at best, with narrow streets and lanes, contained thousands of strangers, who slept about the quays and the fish-market, or in the lanes and entries, or in crowded lodging-houses four or five in a bed. The fever began in May, and quickly spread so much that the priests were kept fully employed by calls to the dying. In June and July the sixty beds of the fever hospital were filled, principally with the fugitives from Connemara. Sixty more beds were added, and these by the middle of September were insufficient. The infection had now spread to many good houses. When Dr Graves and three other Dublin physicians arrived, on 26 September, they found ropes stretched across the streets to stop the wheel traffic. The shops of tradesmen were avoided. The town was like a place in the plague; people passing along the streets put their handkerchiefs to their noses when they came to a house with fever in it. Yet the number of cases was not remarkable; on 3 October, there were 404 sick in a population of 30,000, of whom 130 were in the fever hospital and 274 at their homes, the new cases occurring at the rate of 29 per diem. At length