in a game of dice, and sent on their long walk home across Lecale two hours after the winter midnight, “without money; out of spirits; out of order; without even saying ‘Farewell’”--a strange contrast to the old Irish welcome to travellers and wandering players--a gallant hospitality at the Christmas time of English officers, for whom no season of mercy was sacred, and no obligation of honour, straight dealing, or courtesy binding so far as Irishmen were concerned. The rhymers may have sung as they took their way the fame of the hero-warrior of their people: “Were but the brown leaf which the wood sheds from it gold, were but the white billows silver, Finn would have given it all away.” They may have recalled the lament of the old Irish poet who saw the havoc made by “outlanders” of the ordered hospitality of Irish society. “At the end of the final world [there will be] a refuge to poverty and stinginess and grudging.” They could not see in the far future the open castle of Ardglass. Cards, dice, drinking, and smoking filled up the time of the English visitors, with strolls of curiosity to the Wells and Chair of St. Patrick at Struel, or the huge entrenchments of Celtchair of the Battles. For the night there was a single sleeping-room above the hall, a bed-chamber “arranged in the Irish fashion” with a good and soft bed of down for the owner, and thin pallets thrown on the floor for the company. The dogs of Captain Constable shared the room with the rest, after the Yorkshire manner, leaping on the down bed and howling at their rejection. When Morrison left Downpatrick there came Captain Edward Cromwell--descendant of Thomas Cromwell, minister of ill-fame to Ireland under Henry VIII.--to be Governor of Lecale (1605): “this son of earth and foul spot on the human race,” by whose army the cathedral of Down was burned, and in that conflagration sacred monuments and very ancient writings; and many other churches too, very few of which have been since then restored. The very tombstones were used in building houses and fences; while the people watching lamented the devastation of what had been to them and their fathers “the place of their resurrection,” so that they might go in the fellowship of their saints “to the great assembly of Doom.” To Edward Cromwell the people gave the name “Maol-na-teampull” for his impiety, and numbers of men born in that terrible year of ruin reckoned their age over sixty years after from the days of his sacrilege, as if from a national visitation. In those days perhaps the Irish inhabitants were driven off the fertile land to the very rim of the sea, to set their cabins, as may still be seen, on the last refuge of the shingle itself round the Dundrum bay, or to cluster together on some bare crag.