ack I'll
go to the Hen and Chickens, to find a good dinner there."

He turned and went back slowly along the streets by which he had come,
looking not to right nor left, thinking only of where he should go and
what he should do outside of Ireland.

At the door of the inn he sniffed the dinner Michael had ordered.

"Man alive!" he said as he entered the place and saw the two men with
their hands against the bright fire. "There's only one way to live, and
that's the way I'm going to try."

"Well, you'll not try it alone, sir, if you please," said Michael. "I'll
be with you, if I may."

"And I'll bless you as you go," said Christopher Dogan.

CHAPTER XI. WHITHER NOW?

England was in a state of unrest. She had, as yet, been none too
successful in the war with France. From the king's castle to the poorest
slum in Seven Dials there was a temper bordering on despair. Ministries
came and went; statesmen rose and fell. The army was indifferently
recruited and badly paid. England's battles were fought by men of whom
many were only mercenaries, with no stake in England's rise or fall.

In the army and navy there were protests, many and powerful, against the
smallness of the pay, while the cost of living had vastly increased. In
more than one engagement on land England had had setbacks of a serious
kind, and there were those who saw in the blind-eyed naval policy, in
the general disregard of the seamen's position, in the means used for
recruiting, the omens of disaster. The police courts furnished the navy
with the worst citizens of the country. Quota men, the output of the
Irish prisons--seditious, conspiring, dangerous--were drafted for the
king's service.

The admiralty pursued its course of seizing men of the mercantile
marine, taking them aboard ships, keeping them away for months from the
harbours of the kingdom, and then, when their ships returned, denying
them the right of visiting their homes. The press-gangs did not confine
their activities to the men of the mercantile marine. From the streets
after dusk they caught and brought in, often after ill-treatment, torn
from their wives and sweethearts, knocked on the head for resisting,
tradesmen with businesses, young men studying for the professions,
idlers, debtors, out-of-work men. The marvel is that the British fleets
fought as well as they did.

Poverty and sorrow, loss and bereavement, were in every street, peeped
mournfully out of every window, lurked