lliam and Alexander, never domiciled themselves at any civil
calling. Having caught the roving spirit of camps, they remained in the
skirts of the array which the covenanted Lords at Edinburgh continued to
maintain; and here, poor lads! I may digress a little, to record the
brief memorials of their several unhappy fates.

When King Charles the Second, after accepting and being sworn to abide
by the Covenant, was brought home, and the crown of his ancient
progenitors placed upon his head at Scoone, by the hands of the Marquis
of Argyle, in the presence of the great and the godly Covenanters, my
brothers went in the army that he took with him into England. Michael
was slain at the battle of Worcester, by the side of Sir John Shaw of
Greenock, who carried that day the royal banner. Alexander was wounded
in the same fight, and left upon the field, where he was found next
morning by the charitable inhabitants of the city, and carried to the
house of a loyal gentlewoman, one Mrs Deerhurst, that treated him with
much tenderness; but after languishing in agony, as she herself wrote to
my father, he departed this life on the third day.

Of William I have sometimes wished that I had never heard more; for
after the adversity of that day, it would seem he forgot the Covenant
and his father's house. Ritchie Minigaff, an old servant of the Lord
Eglinton's, when the Earl his master was Cromwell's prisoner in the
Tower of London, saw him there among the guard, and some years after the
Restoration he met him again among the King's yeomen at Westminster,
about the time of the beginning of the persecution. But Willy then
begged Ritchie, with the tear in his eye, no to tell his father; nor was
ever the old man's heart pierced with the anguish which the thought of
such backsliding would have caused, though he often wondered to us at
home, with the anxiety of a parent's wonder, what could have become of
blithe light-hearted Willy. No doubt he died in the servitude of the
faithless tyrant; but the storm that fell among us, soon after Ritchie
had told me of his unfortunate condition, left us neither time nor
opportunity to inquire about any distant friend. But to return to my own
story.

From my marriage till the persecution began, I took no part in the
agitations of the times. It is true, after the discovery of Charles
Stuart's perfidious policy, so like his father's, in corresponding with
the Marquis of Montrose for the subjection of Scotl