ee a living creature, either man, or beast, or bird,--they being all dead, or had quitted those desolated regions.
Our soldiers would tell stories of the places where they saw smoke — it was so rare to see either smoke by day, or fire or candle by night." In this manner did the Irish live and die under Cromwell, suffering by the sword, famine, pestilence and persecution, beholding the confiscation of a kingdom and the banishment of a race. "So there perished," says S. W. Peetry, "in the year 1641, six hundred and fifty thousand human beings, whose blood somebody must atone for to God and the king."
In the reign of Charles II., by the Act of Settlement, four millions and a half of acres were forever taken from the Irish. "This country," says the Earl of Essex, Lord Lieutenant in 1675, "has been perpetually rent and torn since His Majesty's restoration.
I can compare it to nothing better than the flinging the reward on the death of a deer among the packs of hounds — where every on
