ds of the martyrs there, Robin M'Coul came with a
party of his friends to Irvine to bury his father's bones. I was not
myself present at the interment, being, as I have narrated, confined to
my bed by reason of my wound. But I was told by the neighbours, that it
was a very solemn and affecting scene. The grieved lad carried the
relics of his father in a small box in his hands, covered with a white
towel; and the godly inhabitants of the town, young and old, and of all
denominations, to the number of several hundreds, followed him to the
grave where the body was lying; and Willy Sutherland, moved by a simple
sorrow, was the last of all; and he walked, as I was told, alone,
behind, with his bonnet in his hand; for, from his calling, he counted
himself not on an equality with other men. But it is time that I should
return from this digression to the main account of my narrative.

CHAPTER LXXIII

Being wounded, as I have rehearsed, at Drumclog, and carried to my own
house, Sarah Lochrig, while she grieved with a mother's grief for the
loss of our first-born and the mournful fate of my honest brother,
advanced my cure more by her loving ministrations to my aching mind,
than by the medicaments that were applied to the bodily wound, in so
much that something like a dawn of comfort was vouchsafed to me.

Our parish was singularly allowed to remain unmolested when, after the
woful day of Bothwell-brigg, Claverhouse came to ravage the shire of
Ayr, and to take revenge for the discomfiture which he had suffered, in
his endeavour to disturb the worship and sacrament at Loudon-hill.
Still, however, at times clouds overcame my spirit; and one night my
daughter Margaret had a remarkable dream, which taught us to expect some
particular visitation.

It was surely a mysterious reservation for the greater calamity which
ensued, that while the vial of wrath was pouring out around us, my house
should have been allowed to remain so unmolested. Often indeed when in
our nightly worship I returned thanks for a blessing so wonderful in
that time of general woe, has a strange fear fallen upon me and I have
trembled in thought, as if the thing for which I sent up the incense of
my thanks to heaven, was a device of the Enemy of man, to make me think
myself more deserving of favour than the thousands of covenanted
brethren who then, in Scotland, were drinking of the bitterness of the
suffering. But in proportion as I was then spared, the