Of the misery which was caused by this wholesale eviction--after the work had been facilitated by the banishment to Spanish service of 40,000 fighting men and the transportation of crowds more to Barbadoes and elsewhere--some idea may be formed from the following picture. 'A party of horse (Prendergast, p. 308), Tory-hunting on a dark night, saw a light in the distance, which they found to proceed from a ruined cabin, wherein was a great fire of wood, and sitting round about it a company of miserable old women and children, and betwixt them and the fire a dead corpse lay broiling, which as the fire roasted they cut off collops and ate.' This is the record of Colonel Richard Lawrence, an eye-witness. No wonder the wolves multiplied so that even the environs of Dublin became unsafe. That part of the Parliament's doings which grates most on modern ears is their abundant use of Old Testament passages to enforce their edicts. The Irish had such 'an evil witchery,' as Mr. Froude calls it, that even the incoming Puritans got on friendly terms with them. The most stringent orders were therefore issued to keep the two asunder. The Irish are 'a people of God's wrath,' and to intermarry with them is forbidden in the language used by Ezra to forbid the mixed marriages of the Jews. Officers guilty of such a crime are cashiered; dragoons are reduced to common soldiers; soldiers are flogged and made pioneers. 'The moderate Cavalier,' 1675, says that he and his fellows Rather than marrie an Irish wife Would batchellers remain for tearme of life. Of course the mode of paying troops with patches of land was wholly delusive, as the history of the Roman Cæsars might have warned those who adopted it that it would be. Instead of getting a compact body of settlers forming a sort of 'military frontier,' the Parliament unwittingly created vast estates and introduced absenteeism. The soldiers did not care to stay in a poor wasted country where native labour was scarcely to be had: they sold their 'lots' to their officers or others for a horse, a barrel of beer, a little ready money, &c. Thus was laid the foundation of colossal estates like that of the Pettys. It was the same with the small debenture holders; a London vintner or cook who had contributed £25 to the good cause, and held a debenture to that amount for land in Kerry, was not likely to go out and turn backwoodsman. He sold to one of the larger holders; and these larger holders were soon obliged to connive at the gradual return of the dispossessed Irish, who were content (except the Tories) to till as cottiers and hinds the lands which they had lately owned. Thus it was that, despite such a mixture of zeal and cruelty as that to which the book bears witness, the Puritan idea was never realized.