r pious song.

As we were thus standing around the old man in worship and unison of
spirit, the Irvine men came along the road; and seeing us, they hushed
their drums as they passed by, and bowed down their banners in reverence
and solemnity. Such was the outset of the worthies of the renewed
Covenant, in their war with the first Charles.

CHAPTER XLIII

After my father and brothers, with our neighbours that went with them,
had returned from the bloodless raid of Dunse Law, as the first
expedition was called, a solemn thanksgiving was held in all the
country-side; but the minds of men were none pacified by the treaty
concluded with the King at Berwick. For it was manifest to the world,
that coming in his ire, and with all the might of his power, to punish
the Covenanters as rebels, he would never have consented to treat with
them on anything like equal terms, had he not been daunted by their
strength and numbers; so that the spirit awakened by his Ahab-like
domination continued as alive and as distrustful of his word and
pactions as ever.

After the rumours of his plain juggling about the verbals of the
stipulated conditions, and his arbitrary prorogation of the parliament
at Edinburgh, a thing which the best and bravest of the Scottish
monarchs had never before dared to do without the consent of the States
then assembled, the thud and murmur of warlike preparation was renewed
both on anvil and in hall. And when it was known that the King, fey and
distempered with his own weak conceits and the instigations of cruel
counsellors, had, as soon as he heard that the Covenanters were
disbanded, renewed his purposes of punishment and oppression, a gurl of
rage, like the first brush of the tempest on the waves, passed over the
whole extent of Scotland, and those that had been in arms fiercely
girded themselves again for battle.

As the King's powers came again towards the borders, the Covenanters,
for the second time, mustered under Lesley at Dunse; but far different
was this new departure of our men from the solemnity of their first
expedition. Their spirits were now harsh and angry, and their drums
sounded hoarsely on the breeze. Godly Mr Swinton, as he headed them
again, struck the ground with his staff, and, instead of praying, said,
"It is the Lord's pleasure, and he will make the Aggressor fin' the
weight of the arm of flesh. Honest folk are no ever to be thus obligated
to leave their fields and families by