to be seen slowly streaming
west. There were few roads, and those few very bad. Hardly a wheeled
conveyance of any sort existed in the country. Those who were too weak
to walk or to ride had to be carried on men's backs or in horse litters.
The confusion, the misery, the cold, the wretchedness may be conceived,
and always behind, urging them on, rebuking the loiterers, came the
armed escort sent to drive them into exile--Puritan seraphs, with drawn
swords, set to see that none returned whence they came!

Nor was there even any marked satisfaction amongst those who inherited
the lands and houses thus left vacant. Many of the private soldiers who
had received bonds or debentures for their share of the land, had parted
with them long since, either to their own officers or to the trafficers
in such bonds, who had sprang up by hundreds, and who obtained them from
the needy soldiers often for a mere trifle. Sharp-sighted speculators
like Dr. Petty, by whom the well-known Survey of Ireland was made,
acquired immense tracts of land at little or no outlay. Of those
soldiers, too, who did receive grants of land many left after a while.
Others, despite all regulations to the contrary, married Irish wives,
and their children in the next generation were found to have not only
become Roman Catholics, but to be actually unable to speak a word of
English. Many, too, of the dispossessed proprietors, the younger ones
especially, continued to hang about, and either harassed the new owners
and stole their goods, or made friends with them, and managed after a
while to slip back upon some excuse into their old homes. No sternness
of the Puritan leaven availed to hinder the new settlers from being
absorbed into the country, as other and earlier settlers had been
absorbed before them; marrying its daughters, adopting its ways, and
becoming themselves in time Irishmen. The bitter memory of that vast and
wholesale act of eviction has remained, but the good which it was hoped
would spring from it faded away almost within a generation.

XLI.

THE ACT OF SETTLEMENT.

Cromwell was now dead, and after a very short attempt at government his
son Richard had relinquished the reins and retired into private life.
Henry Cromwell, who had for several years been Lord-Lieutenant in
Ireland, and had won no little liking by his mild and equable rule, also
honourably resigned at the same time, and left. Coote, on the other
hand, and Broghill, both of wh