A plague of maggots discovered in Castlecomer - Kilkenny Live

Kilkenny People Archive (1902) - We had great rain here (in Castlecomer) last night. It began about 8pm and lasted until about 8am the next morning.

But oh, sir, we had more. Was it a plague of rats? No. Was it an invasion of locusts, a visitation of phylloxera, an immigration of Colorado beetles? Was it a pitiful maddening series of scenes of eviction, a spirited soul-stirring meeting of the United Irish League dispersed by the batons and rifles of the RIC? Was it the arrest, trial and imprisonment of some of our local leaders?

Was it a belated but brilliant commemoration and jubilation over the unopposed return of Unionists and anti-Idolators to represent the whole-skin Idolators on the county and district councils and board of guardians? Not at all, sir. What then?

Curb your impatience; restrain your curiosity; above all, summon up all your courage, nerve yourself for the shock, turn on the switch of all the electoral force in volts and ampheris of your well-tried and unbeakable system of credulity, and then I will tell you. Are you ready? Well it was a downpour, a rainstorm, a howling tornado, a blistering hurricane, a blinding, choking blizzard, well of - maggots. Mixed you will say.

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Yes. I say, far more mixed than my metaphors. Muddled imagination, diseased brain. Not at all, only the nerves a little shaken as I beheld them under the inspection of the intomological and scientific authoritus to-day.

No microscopic power needed to see them jumping, crawling, twisting, almost flying. I presume they will when they come to maturity - and they were blue, back, green and yellow, orange, spotted, all the colours of the rainbow, and the infinities of combination that exist in the capability of those varied colours, which only a mathematician thoroughly acquainted with the differential calculus and logarith- ums could compute.

Stay you say, you give me the shivers. Yes, and you would get the shakes with them as I got, had you seen them, worse than produced by the worst form of delerium tremons. Perhaps all imagination and a stroke of colours blindness after a severe attack of insomnia and blue pills.

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Please give facts and state in particular whether the downpour, etc., was general or local. Well it was very much local as far as my investigation gave me knowledge. Up to the present I only know that they are to be seen in millions in the yard used as a playground by the children going to the Convent School.

You will ask whence came this extraordinary multitude of creeping, jumping, twisting, horrible repulsive C creatures to infest the town and produce such a dumbfounding sensation of I spectacular effect? Various theories are forthcoming from the 'illuminati and literati' - I got this in a phrase book - from the man in the street as from the man of deepest scientific thought and exploration.

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