questioning him sedately anent what he had heard; but Nahum was raised,
and could give no satisfaction in his answers; he, however, leapt from
his horse, and drawing the bridle through the ring at the door-cheek,
came ben to the fire where we had all so shortly before been
harmoniously sitting. His eyes were wide and wild; his hair, with the
heat he was in, was as if it had been pomated; his cheeks were white,
his lips red, and he panted with haste and panic.

"They're coming," he cried, "in thousands o' thousands; never sic a
force has crossed the Border since the day o' Flodden Field. We'll a'
either be put to the sword, man, woman, and child, or sent in slavery to
the plantations."

"No," replied my father, "things are no just come to that pass; we have
our swords yet, and hearts and hands to use them."

The consternation, however, of Nahum Chapelrig that night was far ayont
all counsel; so, after trying to soothe and reason him into a more
temperate frame, my father was obligated to tell him, that since the
battle was coming so near our gates, it behoved the Covenanters to be
in readiness for the field, advising Nahum to go home, and be over with
him betimes in the morning.

While they were thus speaking, James Newbigging also came to the door
with a rumour of the same substance, which his wife had brought from
Eglinton Castle, where she had been with certain cocks and hens, a
servitude of the Eglintons on their mailing; so that there was no longer
any dubiety about the news, though matters were not in such a desperate
condition as Nahum Chapelrig had terrified himself with the thought of.
Nevertheless, the tidings were very dreadful; and it was a judgment-like
thing to hear that an anointed king was so far left to himself as to be
coming with wrath, and banners, and trampling war-horses, to destroy his
subjects for the sincerity of their religious allegiance to that
Almighty Monarch, who has but permitted the princes of the earth to be
set up as idols by the hands of men.

James Newbigging, as well as Nahum, having come ben to the fireside, my
father called for the Books again, and gave out the eight first verses
of the forty-fourth psalm, which we all sung with hearts in holy unison
and zealous voices.

When James Newbigging and Nahum Chapelrig were gone away home, my father
sat for some time exhorting us, who were his youngest children, to be
kind to one another, to cherish our mother, and no to let auld d