t
of. Besides all this, he reflected, that as it was of consequence he
should reach the Lord Boyd in secrecy, he would be more likely to do so
by stopping at Kilwinning and feeing someone there to guide him to the
Dean Castle by moonlight. I have heard him say, however, the speakable
motives of his deviation from the straight road were at the time far
less effectual in moving him thereto than a something which he could not
tell, that with an invisible hand took his horse, as it were, by the
bridle-rings and constrained him to go into the Kilwinning track. In the
whole of this journey there was indeed a very extraordinary
manifestation of a special providence, not only in the protection
vouchsafed towards himself, but in the remarkable accidents and
occurrences by which he was enabled to enrich himself with the knowledge
so precious at that time to those who were chosen to work the great work
of the Gospel in Scotland.

CHAPTER XIV

As my grandfather came in sight of Kilwinning, and beheld the abbey with
its lofty horned towers and spiky pinnacles and the sands of Cunningham
between it and the sea, it seemed to him as if a huge leviathan had come
up from the depths of the ocean and was devouring the green inland,
having already consumed all the herbage of the wide waste that lay so
bare and yellow for many a mile, desert, and lonely in the silent
sunshine, and he ejaculated to himself that the frugal soil of poor
Scotland could ne'er have been designed to pasture such enormities.

As he rode on, his path descended from the heights into pleasant tracks
along banks feathered with the fragrant plumage of the birch and hazel,
and he forgot, in hearkening to the cheerful prattle of the Garnock
waters, as they swirled among the pebbles by the roadside, the
pageantries of that mere bodily worship which had worked on the
ignorance of the world to raise such costly monuments of the
long-suffering patience of Heaven, while they showed how much the divine
nature of the infinite God and the humility of His eternal Son had been
forgotten in this land among professing Christians.

When he came nigh the town he inquired for an hostel, and a stripling,
the miller's son, who was throwing stones at a flock of geese belonging
to the abbey, then taking their pleasures uninvited in his father's
mill-dam, guided him to the house of Theophilus Lugton, the chief
vintner, horse-setter and stabler in the town, where, on alighting, he