In a few moments they had reached a little wayside village.

There they found children screaming and women wringing their hands. In
the high road lay articles of furniture, huddled together, thrown in
heaps one on another, and broken into fragments in the fall. A
sergeant and company of musketeers were even then in the midst of this
pitiful work of devastation, turning the people out of their little
thatched cottages and flinging their poor sticks of property out after
them. Everywhere were tumult and ruin. Old people were lying on the
cold earth by the wayside. They had been born in these houses; they
had looked to die in these homes; but houses and homes were to be
theirs no more. Amidst the wreck strode the gaunt figure of a factor,
directing and encouraging, and firing off meantime a volley of
revolting oaths.

"What's the name of this place?" asked Ralph of a man who stood, with
fury in his eyes, watching the destruction of his home.

"Hollowbank," answered the man between his teeth.

Ralph remembered that here had lived a well-known Royalist, whom the
Parliament had dispossessed of his estates. The people of this valley
had been ardent Parliamentarians during the long campaign. Could it be
that his lordship had been repossessed of his property, and was taking
this means of revenging himself upon his tenantry for resisting the
cause he had fought for?

An old man lay by the hedge looking down to the ground with eyes that
told only of despair. A little fair-haired boy, with fear in his
innocent face, was clinging to his grandfather's cloak and crying
piteously.

"Get off with you and begone!" cried the factor, rapping out another
volley.

"Is it Hollowbank you call this place?" said Ralph, looking the fellow
in the face. "Hellbank would be a fitter name."

The man answered nothing, but his eyes glared angrily as Ralph put
spur to his horse and rode on.

"God in heaven!" cried Ralph when Sim had come up by his side, "to
think that work like this goes on in God's sight!"

"Yet you say the best happens," said Sim.

"It does; it does; God knows it does, for all that," insisted Ralph.
"But to think of these poor souls thrown out into the road like
cattle. Cattle? To cattle they would be merciful!--thrown out into the
road to lie and die and rot!"

"Have they been outlawed--these men?" said Sim.

"Damnation!" cried Ralph, as though at Sim's ignorant word a new and
terrible thought had flashed upon his min