was the yell that ensued, when my grandfather, going up to
the priest at the high altar, and pulling him by the scarlet and fine
linen of his pageantry, bade him decamp, and flung the toys and trumpery
of the mass after him as he fled away in fear.

This resolute act was the signal for the general demolition, and it
began on all sides; my grandfather giving a leap, caught hold of a fine
effigy of the Virgin Mary by the leg to pull it down; but it proved to
be the one which James Coom the smith had mended, for the leg came off,
and my grandfather fell backwards, and was for a moment stunned by his
fall. A band of the monks, who were standing trembling spectators, made
an attempt, at seeing this, to raise a shout of a miracle; but my
grandfather, in the same moment recovering himself, seized the Virgin's
timber leg, and flung it with violence at them, and it happened to
strike one of the fattest of the flock with such a bir, that it was said
the life was driven out of him. This, however, was not the case; for,
although the monk was sorely hurt, he lived many a day after, and was
obligated, in his auld years, when he was feckless, to be carried from
door to door on a hand-barrow begging his bread. The wives, I have heard
tell, were kindly to him, for he was a jocose carl; but the weans little
respected his grey hairs, and used to jeer him as auld Father
Paternoster, for even to the last he adhered to his beads. It was
thought, however, by a certain pious protestant gentlewoman of Irvine,
that before his death he got a cast of grace; for one day, when he had
been carried over to beg in that town, she gave him a luggie of kail
ower het, which he stirred with the end of the ebony crucifix at his
girdle, thereby showing, as she said, a symptom that it held a lower
place in his spiritual affections than if he had been as sincere in his
errors as he let wot.

CHAPTER XXVI

Although my grandfather had sustained a severe bruise by his fall, he
was still enabled, after he got on his legs, to superintend the
demolishment of the abbey till it was complete. But in the evening, when
he took up his quarters in the house of Theophilus Lugton with Dominick
Callender, who had brought on a party of the Paisley Reformers, he was
so stiff and sore that he thought he would be incompetent to go over
next day with the force that the Earl missioned to herry the Carmelyte
convent at Irvine. Dominick Callender had, however, among other th