urse than was the fluency of my
spirit in its power of resolution.

I had now, from the time that our covenanted host was scattered on
Rullion-green, travelled many miles; and though like a barque drifting
rudderless on the ocean tides, as the stream flows and the blast blows,
I had held no constant course, still my progress had been havenward, in
so much that about sunrise I found myself, I cannot well tell how, on
the heights to the south of Castlemilk, and the city of Glasgow, with
her goodly array of many towers, glittering in the morning beams, lay in
sight some few miles off on the north. I knew it not; but a herd that I
fell in with on the hill told me what town it was, and the names of
divers clachans, and the houses of men of substance in the lowlands
before me.

Among others he pointed out to me Nether Pollock in the midst of a
skirting of trees, the seat and castle of that godly and much-persecuted
Christian and true Covenanter, Sir George Maxwell, the savour of whose
piety was spread far and wide; for he had suffered much, both from sore
imprisonment and the heavy fine of four thousand pounds imposed upon
him, shortly after that conclave of Satan, Middleton's sederunt of the
privy-council at Glasgow, where prelatic cruelty was brought to bed of
her first-born, in that edict against the ministers at the beginning of
the Persecution, whereof I have described the promulgation as it took
place at Irvine.

Being then hungered and very cold, after discoursing with the poor herd,
who was a simple stripling in the ignorance of innocence, I resolved to
bend my way toward Nether Pollock, in the confident faith that the
master thereof, having suffered so much himself, would know how to
compassionate a persecuted brother. And often since I have thought that
there was something higher than reason in the instinct of this
confidence; for indeed, had I reasoned from what was commonly said--and,
alas! owre truly--that the covenanted spirit was bent, if not broken, I
would have feared to seek the gates of Sir George Maxwell, lest the love
he had once borne to our cause had been converted, by his own sufferings
and apprehensions, into dread or aversion. But I was encouraged of the
spirit to proceed.

Just, however, as I parted from the herd, he cried after me, and pointed
to a man coming up the hill at some distance, with a gun in his hand,
and a bird-bag at his side, and two dogs at his heel, saying, "Yon'er's
Sir George