By such drastic means having apparently been purged of his sin, Mr. Hall seems to have regained his normal popularity, and an incident which presently occurred raised it to an even greater height than before. As far back at least as the time of Cromwell it had been customary to send offenders against the law, political prisoners and the like who were not judged quite worthy of the gallows or the block, to what in Charles the Second's day were called His Majesty's Plantations--our colonies, that is, in America or the West Indies. Not only were "incorrigible rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars" thus dealt with, but those also who attended illegal prayer-meetings found themselves in the same box if they happened to have been previously convicted of this heinous offence; and the moss-troopers of Northumberland and Cumberland were treated in similar fashion when taken--deported from their own heathery hills and grey, weeping skies, to the hot swamps and savannahs of Jamaica or Virginia. In the beginning, those sentenced were merely compelled, under penalty of what Weir of Hermiston called being "weel haangit," to remove themselves to the Plantations. Later, a custom sprang up under which criminals of all sorts were delivered over by the authorities to the tender mercies of contractors, who engaged to land them in the West Indies or America, it being one of the conditions of the contract that the services of the prisoner were the property of the contractor for a given number of years. On landing, these wretched prisoners were put up to auction and sold to the highest bidder--in other words, they were slaves. Many men made large sums of money in this inhuman trade, trafficking in the lives of their fellow-countrymen. The thing at last reached such a pitch that practically no able-bodied man was safe from the danger of being kidnapped, sold to some dealer, and shipped off to slavery in the Plantations. That was the fate of many a young man who mysteriously disappeared from the ken of his friends in those seventeenth- and eighteenth-century days. Once shipped to the Plantations, the chance was small of a man ever returning to his native land. Fever, brought on by exposure to the hot sun and heavy rain of a tropical or semi-tropical climate, took care of that; in the West Indies, at least, they died like flies. Not many had the luck, or the constitution, of one Henry Morgan, who, kidnapped in Bristol when a boy and sold as a slave in Barbadoes, lived to be one of the most famous--or rather notorious--buccaneers of all time, and died a knight, Lieutenant-Governor of Jamaica, and commander of our forces in that island.