ey had been scattered when
worshipping God according to the fashion of their fathers, they had
been shot down without a trial, they had been shut up in noisome
prisons--and all this because they would not submit to the most
corrupt government ever known in Scotland, and that most intolerable
kind of tyranny which tries, not only to coerce a man as a citizen,
but also as a Christian. They had many persecutors, but, on the whole,
the most active had been Graham, and it was Graham they hated most. It
is his name rather than that of Dalzell or Lauderdale which has been
passed with execration from mouth to mouth and from generation to
generation in Scotland. The tyrant James had fled, like the coward he
was, and God's deliverer had come--a man of their own faith--in
William of Orange. The iron doors had been burst and the fetters had
been broken, there was liberty to hear the word of the Lord again, and
the Kirk of Scotland was once more free. Justice was being done, but
it would not be perfect till Claverhouse suffered the penalty of his
crimes. It had been the hope of many a dour Covenanter, infuriated by
the wrongs of his friends, if not his own, to strike down Claverhouse
and avenge the sufferings of God's people. Satan had protected his
own, but now the man of blood was given into their hands. Surely it
was the doing of the Lord that Dundee should have left Dudhope, where
he was in stronghold, and come up to Edinburgh, where his friends were
few. That he should go at large upon the streets and take his seat in
the Convention, that he should dare to plot against William and lift a
hand for James in this day of triumph, was his last stroke of
insolence--the drop which filled his cup to overflowing. He had come
to Edinburgh, to which he had sent many a martyr of the Covenant, and
where he had seen Henry Pollock die for Christ's crown and the Scots
kirk. Behold! was it not a sign, and was it not the will of the Lord
that in this high place, where godly men had been murdered by him, his
blood should be spilled as an offering unto the Lord?

This was what the hillmen were saying among themselves as they
gathered in their meetings and communed together in their lodgings.
They were not given to public vaporing, and were much readier to
strike than to speak, but when there are so many, and their hearts are
so hot, a secret cannot be easily kept. And Grimond, who concealed
much shrewdness behind a stolid face--which is the way wi