e was carried; and
on the fourth day from the time he was taken he was executed on the
gallows, where, notwithstanding his guilty life, he suffered with the
bravery of a gentleman dying in a righteous cause, in so much that the
papists honoured his courage as if it had been the virtue of a holy
martyr; and Bailie Kilspinnie all his days never ceased to wonder how so
wicked a man could die so well.

CHAPTER XXXIV

Having thus set forth the main passages in my grandfather's life, I
should now quit the public highway of history, and turn for a time into
the pleasant footpath of his domestic vineyard, the plants whereof,
under his culture, and the pious waterings of Elspa Ruet, my excellent
progenitrix, were beginning to spread their green tendrils and goodly
branches, and to hang out their clusters to the gracious sunshine, as it
were in demonstration to the heavens that the labourer was no sluggard,
and as an assurance that in due season, under its benign favour, they
would gratefully repay his care with sweet fruit. But there is yet one
thing to be told, which, though it may not be regarded as germane to the
mighty event of the Reformation, grew so plainly out of the signal
catastrophe related in the foregoing chapter, that it were to neglect
the instruction mercifully intended were I not to describe all its
circumstances and particularities as they came to pass.

Accordingly to proceed. In the winter after the storming of Dumbarton
Castle, Widow Ruet, the mother of my grandmother, hearing nothing for a
long time of her poor donsie daughter Marion, had, from the hanging of
Archbishop Hamilton, the anti-Christian paramour of that misguided
creature, fallen into a melancholy state of moaning and inward grief, in
so much that Bailie Kilspinnie wrote a letter invoking my grandfather to
come with his wife to Crail, that they might join together in comforting
the aged woman; which work of duty and of charity they lost no time in
undertaking, carrying with them Agnes Kilspinnie to see her kin.

Being minded both in the going and the coming to partake of the feast of
the heavenly and apostolic eloquence of the fearless Reformer's
life-giving truths, they went by the way of Edinburgh; and in going
about while there to show Agnes Kilspinnie the uncos of the town, it
happened as they were coming down from the Castlehill, in passing the
Weigh-house, that she observed a beggar woman sitting on a stair
seemingly in great d