popular clamour. "I told you so," cries the public; "a judgment!"

In this instance, the sin of not interfering to prevent a duel--or a
murder, as popular opinion called it--was punished, firstly, by Hall's
house at Otterburn being burned to the ground, together with all his
farm buildings and great part of his farm stock; and, secondly, this
grievous loss was followed in the time of harvest by a devastating flood
in the Rede, which swept away from the rich, low-lying haughs every
particle of the fat crops which already had been cut, and were now
merely waiting to be carried home.

By such drastic means having apparently been purged of his sin, Mr. Hall
seems to have regained his normal popularity, and an incident which
presently occurred raised it to an even greater height than before. As
far back at least as the time of Cromwell it had been customary to send
offenders against the law, political prisoners and the like who were not
judged quite worthy of the gallows or the block, to what in Charles the
Second's day were called His Majesty's Plantations--our colonies, that
is, in America or the West Indies. Not only were "incorrigible rogues,
vagabonds, and sturdy beggars" thus dealt with, but those also who
attended illegal prayer-meetings found themselves in the same box if
they happened to have been previously convicted of this heinous offence;
and the moss-troopers of Northumberland and Cumberland were treated in
similar fashion when taken--deported from their own heathery hills and
grey, weeping skies, to the hot swamps and savannahs of Jamaica or
Virginia. In the beginning, those sentenced were merely compelled, under
penalty of what Weir of Hermiston called being "weel haangit," to remove
themselves to the Plantations. Later, a custom sprang up under which
criminals of all sorts were delivered over by the authorities to the
tender mercies of contractors, who engaged to land them in the West