He was one of those who contended that the Amalekites should be utterly destroyed by the sword, and he considered that the retention of the corner of their domains, by the Davenants, was a direct flying in the face of the providence who had given them into the hands of the faithful. Not that, had he obtained possession of the ruined castle, Zephaniah Whitefoot would have repaired it or set up his abode there. The followers of Cromwell had no eyes for the beautiful. They were too much in earnest to care aught for the amenities of life, and despised, as almost sinful, anything approximating to beauty, either in dress, person, or surroundings. The houses that they reared, in this land of which they had taken possession, were bare to the point of ugliness, and their interior was as cold and hard as was the exterior. Everything was for use, nothing for ornament. Scarce a flower was to be seen in their gardens, and laughter was a sign of levity, to be sternly repressed. Their isolation, in the midst of a hostile population, caused them no concern whatever. They cared for no society or companionship, save that of their own households, which they ruled with a rod of iron; and an occasional gathering, for religious purposes, with the other settlers of their own faith. They regarded the Irish as Papists, doomed to everlasting perdition, and indeed consigned to that fate all outside their own narrow sect. Such a people could no more mix with the surrounding population than oil with water. As a rule, they tilled as much ground in the immediate vicinity of their houses as they and their families could manage, and the rest of the land which had fallen into their possession they let, either for a money payment, or, more often, for a portion of the crops raised upon it, to such natives as were willing to hold it on these terms. The next generation had fallen away somewhat from their fathers' standards. It is not in human nature to stand such a strain as their families had been subjected to. There is an innate yearning for joy and happiness, and even the sternest discipline cannot keep man forever in the gloomy bonds of fanaticism. In most cases, the immediate descendants of Cromwell's soldiers would gladly have made some sort of compromise, would have surrendered much of their outlying land to obtain secure and peaceful possession of the rest, and would have emerged from the life of gloomy seclusion, in which they found themselves; but no whisper of any such feeling as this would be heard in the household of Zephaniah Whitefoot, so long as he lived.