had
surrendered on promise of their lives, were massacred in cold blood. As
for the more irregular murders committed in the open field upon
helpless, terrified creatures, powerless to defend themselves, they are
too numerous to relate, and there is happily no purpose to be gained in
repeating the harrowing details. The effect produced by the condition of
the survivors upon those who saw them arrive in Dublin and
elsewhere--spent, worn out, frozen with cold, creeping along on hands
and knees, and all but at the point of death--was evidently
ineffaceable, and communicates itself vividly to us as we read their
descriptions.

The effect of cruelty, too, is to produce more cruelty; of horrors like
these to breed more horrors; till the very earth seems covered with the
hideous brood, and the most elementary instincts of humanity die away
under their poisonous breath. So it was now in Ireland. The atrocities
committed upon one side were almost equalled, though not upon so large a
scale by the other. One of the first actions performed by a Scotch
force, sent over to Carrickfergus by the king, was to sally out like
demons and mercilessly slaughter some thirty Irish families living in
Island Magee, who had nothing whatever to say to the rising. In Wicklow,
too, Sir Charles Coote, sent to suppress a disturbance amongst the
O'Byrnes and O'Tooles, perpetrated atrocities the memory of which still
survives in the region, and which, for cold-blooded, deliberate horror
almost surpass those committed in the north. The spearing by his
soldiery of infants which had hardly left the breast he himself openly
avowed, and excused upon the plea that if allowed to survive they would
grow up to be men and women, and that his object was to extirpate the
entire brood.

Here and there a faint gleam falls upon the blackened page. Bedell, the
Bishop of Kilmore, who had won the reverence even of his fiercest
opponents, was allowed to remain free and undisturbed in the midst of
the worst scenes of carnage and outrage; and when a few months later he
died, was followed weeping to the grave by many who had been foremost in
the work of horror. As to the number of those who actually perished,
either from exposure, or by the hands of assassins, it has been so
variously estimated that it seems to be all but impossible to arrive at
anything like exact statistics. The tale was black enough as it really
stood, but it was made blacker still by rumour and exaggera