so often came out at, needs
a key, needs many keys, and many keys of no common kind, and it needs a
janitor also, or rather a redeemer and a deliverer of a kind
corresponding to the kind of gate and the kind of confinement on which
the gate shuts and opens. And when Lady Robertland thought of her rare
outgates--and she thought more about them than about anything else that
ever happened to her--and as often as she could get an ear and a heart
into which to tell them, she always pictured to her audience and to
herself the majestic Figure of the first chapter of the Revelation. She
often spoke of her rare outgates to David Dickson, and Robert Blair, and
John Livingstone, and to her own Stewarton minister, Mr. Castlelaw, whose
name written in water on earth is written in letters of gold in heaven.
'Not much of a preacher himself, he encouraged his people to attend Mr.
Dickson's sermons, and he often employed Mr. Blair to preach at
Stewarton, and accompanied him back and forward, singing psalms all the
way.' Her ladyship often told saintly Mr. Castlelaw of her rare
outgates, and always so spoke to him of the Amen, who has the keys of
hell and of death, that he never could read that chapter all his days
without praising God that he had had the Lady Robertland and her rare
outgates in his sin-sick parish.

But it is time to turn to some of those special and rare outgates that
the Amen with the keys gave to His favoured handmaiden, the Lady
Robertland; and the first kind of outgate, on account of which she was
always such an astonishment to herself, was what she would call her
outgate from providential disabilities, entanglements, and
embarrassments. She was wont to say to William Guthrie, who best
understood her witty words and her wonderful history, that the wicked
fairies had handicapped her infant feet in her very cradle. She could
use a freedom of speech with Guthrie, and he with her, such as neither of
them could use with Livingstone or with Rutherford. Rutherford could not
laugh when his heart was breaking, as Lady Robertland and the witty
minister of Fenwick were often overheard laughing. 'Yes, but your
Ladyship has won the race with all your weights,' Guthrie would laugh and
say. 'One of my many races,' she would answer, with half a smile and
half a sigh; 'but I have a long race, many long races, still before me.
It seemed _conclamatum est_ with me,' she would then say, quoting a well-
known expression of Samu