Patrick Ring, examined before the Royal Commission at Kilkenny, Oct. 8, 1844: “There was a gentleman came over to Ireland of the name of Somerville. He had heard of my case and how I was persecuted. He hired a car and went out to Bennet’s Bridge, and got up to the place and saw my mother out in the ruins with an infant in her arms, after she had come out from the mother [his wife] striving to mind the mother and to mind the child. They [family of children] were in a famishing way; and he saw her and left her [a sum of money was named but misprinted]. He brought me into Kilkenny and he kept me at Flude’s Hotel taking down my case two days and a night. I told him I was going to Dublin and he gave me money and clothes, and then he took me to Dublin, and he got my case put in the _Morning Chronicle_ in London, and he laid it also before Mr. O’Connell” &c. Extract of a letter from Patrick Ring written from Bennet’s Bridge, Kilkenny, 4th Oct. 1844 to Alexander Somerville in London: “My Dear Sir. I take the liberty of writing to you as I know I am welcome, hoping to find you and your dear mistress, my best friend on earth, well, as this leaves me and my family at present. Them all is recovered from the fever, and you next to God was the means of it, you and your dear mistress.” In the famine years I was again sent to Ireland by the proprietors of the Manchester _Examiner_, and on behalf of benevolent persons in England, to trace the courses of the pestilence. Some Irish newspapers and many clergymen catholic and protestant hailed my presence in the country warmly. On my sending to England reports of villages or districts which were especially distressed benevolent persons and societies forwarded money to catholic priests and others whom I named as persons to be entrusted with funds for the relief of the perishing people. In 1848, I was, with an artist, the representative of the _Illustrated London News_, sent to Ireland to describe the progress of Smith O’Brien’s insurrection.