It lay in no man's mouth to speak harshly of Jeremiah Madden.
He had been born a Connemara peasant, and he would die one.

When he was ten years old he had seen some of his own family, and most of his neighbors, starve to death.

He could remember looking at the stiffened figure of a woman stretched on the stones by the roadside, with the green stain of nettles on her white lips.

A girl five years or so older than himself, also a Madden and distantly related, had started in despair off across the mountains to the town where it was said the poor-law officers were dealing out food.

He could recall her coming back next day, wild-eyed with hunger and the fever; the officers had refused her relief because her bare legs were not wholly shrunken to the bone.
"While there's a calf on the shank, there's no starvation," they had explained to her.