It was “murder,” and no fair fight, folk said; and, whatever the rights of the case, at least the successful duellist was afterwards hanged for the murder.  Hall’s failure to interfere seems to have strained his popularity for a time.  In such circumstances people are prone to assume that an all-wise Providence, necessarily seeing eye to eye with them, inflicts some special punishment on the person who has sinned some special sin, or who has, at all events, done (or not done) something which, in the popular judgment, he should not have done (or done, as the case may be).  Misfortune or accident comes to some one who has roused 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 Indies or America, it being one of the conditions of the contract that the services of the prisoner were the property of the contractor for a given number of years.  On landing, these wretched prisoners were put up to auction and sold to the highest bidder—­in other words, they were slaves.  Many men made large sums of money in this inhuman trade, trafficking in the lives of their fellow-countrymen.  The thing at last