Many sins, no doubt, may be laid to the charge of the Parliament and its army. But of two sins terribly common in civil strife they were never guilty; indiscriminate plunder and secret assassination. The ruins and desecrations the Commonwealth soldiers wrought in churches and cathedrals, will tell their tale against us to many a generation to come. The ruins the Royalist troopers wrought were in poor men's homes long since repaired. The desecrations they wrought were also in homes, ruins and desecrations of temples not made with hands, and never to be repaired, but recorded on sacred inviolable tables, more durable than any stone, though not to be read on earth, at least not yet. The village of Netherby lay just beyond the edge of the royal devastations. But the cattle all around us were seized, with all the corn that was reaped. And at night the sky was all aglow with the flames of burning cottages, and corn and hay-stacks. Our own barns were untouched, but my Father gave orders at once to begin husbanding our stores by limiting our daily food, looking on what was spared to us as the granary of the whole destitute neighbourhood through the coming winter, and as the seed-store for the following spring. Our sheds and out-houses, meantime, were fitted up for those who had been driven from their homes. Every cottage in Netherby gave shelter to some homeless neighbour. Rachel Forster's became an orphan-house. Yet it was the private lesson which was taught our own family through this foray of His Majesty's that is engraven most deeply in my memory.