the minister's seat and
the pulpit, was near to where the bell-rope hung on the outer wall, and
as the family went towards it, one of the elders stepped from the plate
at the main door to open it. But after Mrs Swinton and the children were
gone in, the minister, who always stopped till they had done so, instead
of then following, paused and looked up with a compassionate aspect, and
laying his hand on the shoulder of old Willy Shackle, who was ringing
the bell, he said,--

"Stop, my auld frien,--they that in this parish need a bell this day to
call them to the service of their Maker winna come on the summons o'
yours."

He then walked in; and the old man, greatly affected, mounted the stool,
and tied up the rope to the ring in the wall in his usual manner, that
it might be out of the reach of the school weans. "But," said he, as he
came down, "I needna fash; for after this day little care I wha rings
the bell; since it's to be consecrat to the wantonings o' prelacy, I wis
the tongue were out o' its mouth and its head cracket, rather than that
I should live to see't in the service of Baal and the hoor o' Babylon."

After all the congregation had taken their seats, Mr Swinton rose and
moved towards the front of the pulpit, and the silence in the church was
as the silence at the martyrdom of some holy martyr. He then opened THE
BOOK, and having given out the ninety-fourth psalm, we sang it with
weeping souls; and during the prayer that followed there was much
sobbing and lamentations, and an universal sorrow. His discourse was
from the fifth chapter of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, verse first, and
first clause of the verse; and with the tongue of a prophet, and the
voice of an apostle, he foretold, as things already written in the
chronicles of the kingdom, many of those sufferings which afterwards
came to pass. It was a sermon that settled into the bottom of the hearts
of all that heard it, and prepared us for the woes of the vial that was
then pouring out.

At the close of the discourse, when the precentor rose to read the
remembering prayer, old Ebenezer Muir, then upwards of fourscore and
thirteen, who had been brought into the church on a barrow by two of his
grandsons, and was, for reason of his deafness, in the bench with the
elders, gave him a paper, which, after rehearsing the names of those in
distress and sickness, he read, and it was "The persecuted kirk of
SCOTLAND."

"If I forget thee, O Jerusalem! le