In 1844, a year before the failure of the potato crop, Mrs Asenath Nicholson arrived in Ireland from New York "to learn the true condition of the poor Irish at home, and ascertain why so many moneyless, half-clad illiterate emigrants are daily landed on our shores". A widow, she had run a temperance boarding house in New York and employed girls from Kilkenny, and she made her way to visit their families. There she was followed by men, women and children, hands outstretched, saying "Welcome to Ireland". She visited the widowed mother of one of her girls, who with two grown-up sons and a grandson shared their cabin with (at times, presumably), two pigs fattening for the fair, and turkeys and ducks, all of which fed on the remains of the supper. The family asked themselves what she would eat: "It's not the potato that raired her." But Asenath the redoubtable was a vegetarian and soon convinced them the potato was fine. Next day, although she pointed out it was the Sabbath, the neighbours gathered, and the eldest son, dressed to the nines, invited her to lead the dance with him. She "had no reason to hope that, at my age of nearly half-a-century, I could ever expect another like offer." Three score and ten people led her outside, placed her on a cart "and danced for an hour solely for my amusement and welcome". They each shook her by the hand and walked quietly away.
Thus Melosina Lenox-Conyngham introduces one of the great travellers of the times in the current Ireland of the Welcomes. A fine article. The reception Asenath received at the big houses was not always so kindly. She was a great walker, stayed at the poorest cabins and lived off three or four potatoes a day. She wore what she referred to as her Polka coat, a velvet bonnet, shoes of Indiarubber; she carried a parasol, a basket with a change of linen and a large black bearskin muff. Two bags on a string round her waist held the New Testament in English and Irish for distribution. She sang as she walked along.
She wrote a book which foretold an explosion to come. It came. She returned to Ireland in 1847 and helped feed families in Dublin. She went west where she saw misery without a mask, and wrote Annals of the Famine in Ireland. After her first trip she had written Ire- land's Welcome to a Stranger in which she had "surveyed the beautiful domains and seen walking rags that by hedge and by ditch, in bog and field, are covering the length and breadth of the land". She could write as well as talk. Y