The obedient Foxhunters (so called from the brushes they wore in their helmets) hacked down with their sabres the defenceless peasants to the number of three hundred and more. There were eighty-five widows in one single street of Kildare that afternoon. It is but fair to say that no part of the infamy of this splendid joke attaches to General Dundas, for the massacre was shown to have taken place without his knowledge or consent. Duff and the colonel of the Foxhunters must bear the brunt of it alone, along with other jests of equal brilliancy. A few of the victims managed to scuttle off, hiding in furze-bushes or behind walls, and reached Kildare at nightfall, to tell the tale of butchery. A woman who lay ill ten miles off, woke (so it is said) from a vision of her husband weltering in gore, and nothing would appease her but that her daughter and aged father should go forth to seek him. They were met by knots of country-folk flying along the road in wildest excitement. 'Bad news, old man!' they wailed as they pursued their course like a whirl of wraiths. 'Our friends lie kilt--God rest their sowls--_all_--on the Curragh, this day!' Old man and grandchild harnessed a horse and car, determined to learn more. The gloaming rested on the plain when they reached the Gibbet-Rath. Two hundred bodies were turned over before they came upon the one they sought. Its hands moved, in an effort to stanch a wound with a remnant of an old cravat, and in the increasing darkness they chanced to observe the flutter. But for that movement, where so many around were still, they might have passed by their bread-winner. Filled with thankfulness in that he yet lived, they stretched him on the car, for prudence' sake in corpse-like attitude, shaded his eyes with a hat, sprinkled some soiled hay over his prostrate form, and hurried home in haste. But a rumour somehow got wind that 'the Croppies were getting alive again,' and so the military were sent round to scour the adjacent country to make certain that no such untoward circumstance occurred. Two men belonging to the Ancient Britons approached the hut at midnight where this man lay, snatched by a marvel from the jaws of Death. 'What!' one said, 'that Croppy living still?' 'Yes, your honour,' replied the sick wife, with meekness. 'The Lord has been pleased to grant the boy a longer day.' 'Come, come!' was the jocose retort. 'He'll be best out of misery, for he can't possibly recover. Leastways, his curing will be tedious to an ailing wife like you.' And the wretch pistolled him in cold blood then and there, while the frenzied widow shrieked for mercy, and the daughter strove to shield him with her own body in the ecstasy of her despair.