The year 1846 closed in gloom. It left the Irish people sinking in thousands into their graves, under the influence of a famine as general as it was intense, and which trampled down every barrier set up to stay its desolating progress. But the worst had not yet come. It was in 1847 that the highest point of misery and death had been reached. Skibbereen, to be sure, ceased to attract so much attention as it had been previously doing, but the people of that devoted town had received much relief; besides, there were now fewer mouths to fill there, so many were closed in death, at the Windmill-hill, in the Workhouse grounds, and in the churchyard of Abbeystrowry. Instead of one, Ireland had now many Skibbereens. In short, the greater part of it might be regarded as one vast Skibbereen. In the Autumn of 1846, the famine, which all saw advancing, seized upon certain districts of the South and West; but as ulcers, which first appear in isolated spots upon the body, enlarge until, touching each other, they become confluent, so had the famine, limited in its earlier stages to certain localities, now spread itself over the entire country. Hence, it is not in any new forms of suffering amongst the famine-stricken people that its increasing horrors are to be looked for: it is in its universality, and in the deadly effects of a new scourge--fever--which was not only manifesting itself throughout the land at this time, but had already risen to an alarming height--a thing not to be wondered at, because it is the certain offspring, as well as the powerful auxiliary, of famine.