SNIPPET: A witness to the extent of Irish poverty was Asenath NICHOLSON, a widowed American temperance crusader and Protestant evangelist, who arrived from New York on the eve of the famine to distribute Bibles among the Catholic poor and stayed to become a one-woman relief expedition. Mrs. NICHOLSON told of giving a "sweet biscuit" to an obviously famished children, who held it in her hand and stared at it. "How is it," she asked the child's mother, "she cannot be hungry?" The mother replied that the child had never seen such a delicacy before and "cannot think of parting with it." Mrs. NICHOLSON marveled that "such self-denial in a child was quite beyond my comprehension, but so inured are these people to want, that their endurance and self-control are almost beyond belief." Similar anecdotes of visitors were confirmed by a commission of inquiry formed to study the extent of Irish poverty. Reporting in 1835 (a decade before the Great Famine), the commission noted that two-fifths of the population lived in "fourth-class accommodations" - one-room windowless mud cabins - and at least two and a half million people annually required some assistance in order to avoid starvation. It has been estimated that when the blight devastated the potatoes of Ireland in the late summer of 1845 that the potato crop had represented about 60 percent if Ireland's annual food supply and nearly three and a half million people had relied on it for the largest part of their diet. A generation after the famine, many families still lived hungry, shoeless, and in rags in bare, dirt-floored, unfurnished cabins in places such as Galway. Some years later, in a still-destitute Ireland, tenants are evicted from their cottages, their meager possessions thrown out into the yard. -- Excerpts, Peter QUINN, "The Tragedy Of Bridget Such-A-One," December 1997 issue of "American Heritage" magazine. Mr. QUINN is also the author of "Banished Children of Eve," a novel about the Irish in New York during the 1860s, published by Penguin in 1994