favoured
of Him than David or Solomon, or any other princes or kings.

When he was very young, not passing, as I have heard him often tell,
more than six or seven years of age, he was taken, along with his
brethren, by my grandfather, to see the signing at Irvine of the
Covenant, with which, in the lowering time of the Spanish armada, King
James, the son of Mary, together with all the Reformed, bound themselves
in solemn compact to uphold the protestant religion. Afterwards, when he
saw the country rise in arms, and heard of the ward and watch, and the
beacons ready on the hills, his imagination was kindled with some
dreadful conceit of the armada, and he thought it could be nothing less
than some awful and horrible creature sent from the shores of perdition
to devour the whole land. The image he had thus framed in his fears
haunted him continually; and night after night he could not sleep for
thinking of its talons of brass, and wings of thunder, and nostrils
flaming fire, and the iron teeth with which it was to grind and gnash
the bodies and bones of all protestants, in so much that his parents
were concerned for the health of his mind, and wist not what to do to
appease the terrors of his visions.

At last, however, the great Judith of the protestant cause, Queen
Elizabeth of England, being enabled to drive a nail into the head of
that Holofernes of the idolaters, and many of the host of ships having
been plunged, by the right arm of the tempest, into the depths of the
seas, and scattered by the breath of the storm, like froth over the
ocean, it happened that, one morning about the end of July, a cry arose
that a huge galley of the armada was driven on the rocks at Pencorse;
and all the shire of Ayr hastened to the spot to behold and witness her
shipwreck and overthrow. Among others my grandfather, with his three
eldest sons, went, leaving my father at home; but his horrors grew to
such a passion of fear that his mother, the calm and pious Elspa Ruet,
resolved to take him thither likewise, and to give him the evidence of
his eyes, that the dreadful armada was but a navy of vessels like the
ship which was cast upon the shore. By this prudent thought of her, when
he arrived at the spot his apprehensions were soothed; but his mind had
ever after a strange habitude of forming wild and wonderful images of
every danger, whereof the scope and nature was not very clearly
discerned, and which continued with him till the end