SNIPPET: Elizabeth GRANT was born in Scotland and was proud of her old Highland blood. Her father, Sir Peter GRANT, the laird of Rothiemurchus, was a lawyer and a member of Parliament, but ran up such huge debts that he had to take refuge in France from his creditors. In spite of this, he was appointment to a judgeship in Bombay and the whole family sailed for India with the newly-made judge being smuggled aboard the ship from a small boat that put out from Jersey. In Bombay, Elizabeth met and married Colonel Henry SMITH, who was some 15 years older than herself. In 1830, he inherited an estate in Wicklow and they came back to Ireland. Baltiboys, near Blessington, had 1,200 acres that had been much neglected by the previous owner. He had pulled the house down in order to sell the materials and the tenants were so ragged and impoverished that Elizabeth thought a crowd of beggars had come to greet them at the gates. Over the next ten years the SMITHs rebuilt the house and improved the farms, planting the first field of turnips ever to be seen in that part of the world; when they had the money they built chimneys and put windows into the cabins. Elizabeth set up a school. The character that emerges from the diary she kept (and parts of which appear in "Diaries of Ireland, An Anthology," pub. 1998, Lilliput Press) is practical, intelligent. It is clear that much of the management of the estate was in her capable hands. Occasionally she interferes too blatantly - evidently the steward gave notice because she demonstrated to him how to weed turnips with a hoe in the Scotch way! On November 5, 1845, her husband brought in two blighted potatoes, the first they had seen at Baltiboys. By the 11th, the blight had spread through their fields. During the autumn of 1846, with their situation worsening, they worked out a plan to buy flour and coal in bulk. In December, 1847, she wrote: "The people are starving and the poor house has 1,100 where there never used to be 200." At Baltiboys, Elizabeth and her husband were giving milk and soup to their twelve workmen and soup to the sick and aged. Elizabeth was always railing against the improvidence of the Irish. She often wrote of the ignorance and indolence of the other landlords. She said that she "had made up her mind that the distress of the poor demanded a large sacrifice on the part of the richer," and to that end the family gave up many of the luxuries to which they had been accustomed, thought she was rather sad when her husband would not let her daughter attend any of the festivities in Dublin for QUEEN VICTORIA's visit because of the expense. Elizabeth said, "We must all do our utmost, share our all." In January of 1847, a beef was killed "for our poor," and "we make daily a large pot of good soup which is served gratis to 22 people at present." She goes on to say, "I thought it quite a pretty sight yesterday in the kitchen, all the workmen coming in for their portions, a quart with a slice of the beef; half of them get this one day for a dinner with a bit of their own bread; the other half get milk and the cheap rice we have provided for them. Next day they reverse the order. The Colonel is giving them firing too; so they are really comfortable; there are twelve of them and ten pensioners, old feeble men and women, or those with large families of children; some of them no longer living on our ground yet having been once connected with us we can't desert them." Two years later, a discouraged Elizabeth writes, "I was shocked at our own school, no rosy cheeks, no merry laugh, little skeletons in rags with white faces and large staring eyes crouching against one another half dead. How can we remedy it? No way; how feed sixty children? If we were to coin ourselves into halfpence we could not give a meal a day to one hundredth part of our teeming neighbourhood. The poor little DOYLEs, so clean, so thin, so sad, so naked, softened my heart to the foolish parents. They are on our own hill although not our own people, they must not die of hunger. If I could manage to give a bit of bread daily to each pauper child, but we have no money, much more than we can afford is spent on labour, the best kind of charity, leaving little for ought else..." A year earlier, she had written about possibly the same DOYLE family - "Jim DOYLE, the son of those miserable people upon the hill who went out last year to a kind uncle in America, writes home that this uncle met him on the quay and had two suits of clothes ready for him as people must be well dressed in that country and has put him into a factory where his wages are 20/a week. Will the poverty-stricken parents let this well doing lad alone or let him really help them by sending bye and bye for a brother or sister? I fear that neighbour-like they will try to draw all he can spare from him to help them exist in their wretchedness, and they are so wretched, so very nearly destitute all of them, we can hardly wonder at the pauper family clinging to and draining a prosperous member," and in December, 1848, Elizabeth's diary shows that Mrs. DOYLE had come to her "with her tale of destitution, that she had five children at home and a cripple for a husband, an incurable, she was b! lind herself and her only grown up daughter was hopelessly lazy." She advised Mrs. DOYLE to go to the Poor House, but Mrs. DOYLE told her that the poor house was full. At one point, seemingly overwhelmed, Elizabeth writes, "I begin to think a pestilence in this darkened land would be a mercy to it."