take
hold of mine, but the broken links of the shackle still round my wrist
made him cry out,--

"What's this?--Whare hae ye come fra? But I need na inquire."

"I have broken out of the tolbooth o' Irvine," said I, "and I am fleeing
here with Mr Witherspoon."

"I, too," replied my brother, mournfully, "hae escaped from the hands of
the persecutors."

We then entered into some conversation concerning what had happened to
us respectively, from the fatal twenty-eighth of November, when our
power and host were scattered on Rullion-green, wherein Mr Witherspoon,
with me, rehearsed to him the accidents herein set forth, with the
circumstantials of some things that befel the godly man after I left him
with the corpse of the baby in his arms; but which being in some points
less of an adventurous nature than had happened to myself, I shall be
pardoned by the courteous reader for not enlarging upon it at greater
length. I should, however, here note, that Mr Witherspoon was not so
severely dealt with as I was; for though an outcast and a fugitive, yet
he was not a prisoner; on the contrary, under the kindly cover of the
Lady Auchterfardel, whose excellent and truly covenanted husband was a
sore sufferer by the fines of the year 1662, he received great
hospitality for the space of sixteen days, and was saved between two
feather beds, on the top of which the laird's aged mother, a bed-rid
woman, was laid, when some of Drummond's men searched the house on an
information against him.

But disconsolatory as it was to hear of such treatment of a
Gospel-minister, though lightened by the reflection of the saintly
constancy that was yet to be found in the land, and among persons too of
the Lady of Auchterfardel's degree, and severe as the trials were, both
of body and mind, which I had myself undergone, yet were they all as
nothing compared to the hardships of my brother, a man of a temperate
sobriety of manner, bearing all changes with a serene countenance and a
placable mind, while feeling them in the uttermost depths of his
capacious affections.

"On the night of the battle," said he, "it would not be easy of me to
tell which way I went, or what ensued, till I found myself with three
destitute companions on the skirts of the town of Falkirk. By that time
the morning was beginning to dawn, and we perceived not that we had
approached so nigh unto any bigget land; as the day, however, broke, the
steeple caught our eye, and we halt