goods, and to
provide some sort of a roof to shelter him in this new and forlorn home
to which he was being sent.

It happened, too, that some of the first batches of exiles were ordered
into North Clare, to a district known as the Burren, whose peculiarity
is that what little soil is to be found there has collected into rifts
below the surface, or accumulated into pockets of earth at the feet of
the hills, leaving the rest of the surface sheer rock, the very streams,
whose edges would otherwise be green, being mostly carried underground.
The general appearance of the region has been vividly described by one
of the commissioners engaged in carrying out this very act of
transplantation, who, writing back to Dublin for further instructions,
informs his superiors that the region in question did not possess "water
enough to drown a man, trees enough to hang a man, or earth enough to
bury a man." It may be conceived what an effect such a region, so
described, must have had upon men fresh from the fertile and flourishing
pasture-lands of Meath and Kildare. Many turned resolutely back,
preferring rather to die than to attempt life under such new and
hopeless conditions, and stern examples had to be made before the
unwilling emigrants were at last fairly got underweigh.

Yet even such exile as this was better than the lot of some. The wives
and families of the Irish officers and soldiers who had been allowed to
go into foreign service, had, of necessity, been left behind, and a
considerable number of these, the Government now proceeded to ship in
batches to the West Indies to be sold as slaves. Several thousand women,
ladies and others, were thus seized and sold by dealers, often without
any individual warrant, and it was not until after the accidental
seizure of some of the wives of the Cromwellian soldiers that the
traffic was put under regulations. Cromwell's greatness needs no
defence, but the slaughter of the garrisons of Drogheda and Wexford,
reckoned amongst the worst blemishes upon that greatness, pales beside
such an act as this; one which would show murkily even upon the
blackened record of an Alva or a Pizarro.

Slowly the long trains of exiles began now to pour out in all
directions. Herds of cattle, horses laden with furniture, with food,
with all the everyday necessities of such a multitude accompanied them.
All across that wide limestone plain, which covers the centre of
Ireland, innumerable family groups were