So far as the Croppies were concerned, the rebellion ended with the clever feat of General Lake. The few who escaped his vengeance spread themselves over the country in predatory bands. Some sought refuge in the Wicklow hills; some perished miserably as banditti; few ever returned to their homes. It was not death so much that the Irish peasant feared. His life was wretched. He had been brought up to consider that three kinds of death were natural--first, in his bed; secondly, by hanging at assize time; thirdly, of collapse when the potato crop went wrong. He could face death. _It was torture that he dreaded_--the pitch-caps, the picketings, the roastings alive, the lash. These it was that made a savage and a coward of him. So far as the executive was concerned, the rebellion was by no means over. Gordon, a Protestant clergyman and reliable witness, tells us that 'more than fell in battle in Wexford were slain afterwards in cold blood.' Those who would not surrender were hunted down; those who did were strung up without a form of trial. Vinegar Hill became _elastic_ through the numberless victims who had found rest and a merciful oblivion beneath its sod. So soon as massacre, in garb of war, had done her work, judicial murder commenced on a more extended scale. When the appetite of Até was sated in the country, she moved with the Eumenides--faithful and obedient maids of honour--to the capital, for change of air and scene. END OF VOL. II.