the soldiers, as though to get out of their way, and instantly
ordered him to be shot, without any examination. In the "Cloud of
Witnesses" an epitaph is quoted to show that the man was shot for
refusing the abjuration oath.

Next we find four men dragged out of a house at Auchencloy, on Dee-side,
where they had met for prayer, and shot before the door, without any
examination. Defoe gives the names of the four as John Grier, Robert
Fergusson, Archibald Stuart, and Robert Stuart. Shields substitutes for
Archibald Stuart the name of James Macmichael. In "The Cloud of
Witnesses" only Grier, Robert Stuart, and Fergusson are named. In
Wodrow's pages the four men become eight: of these four, as given by
Shields (Macmichael, however, being spelt Macmichan), were shot at once:
two more, Smith and Hunter, were carried to Kirkcudbright and hanged
after a form of trial: two, unnamed, got safe away. "It may be," adds
Wodrow, "the rescue of some prisoners at Kirkcudbright by some of the
wanderers, a little before this, was the pretext for all this cruelty."

It may indeed have been so, and something more than a rescue of
prisoners may have helped. The affair on Dee-side took place December
18th, 1684. On the 11th of the same month (just after Renwick's
proclamation of war) a party of men, headed by James Macmichael,
murdered Peter Peirson, minister of Carsphairn, at his own door. Wodrow
cannot shirk this fact: he finds it detestable, and generally denounced
and disowned by the more respectable of the Covenanters; but he also
manages to find as many excuses for it as he conveniently can in the
provocation given by the victim. Peirson, he says, was "a surly,
ill-natured man, and horridly severe." He was of great service to Lagg
in ferreting out rebels, used to sit in court with him to advise him of
the prisoners' characters, and generally make himself obnoxious to the
Covenanters. He was also accused of leaning to popery, and is said on
one occasion to have openly defended the doctrine of purgatory; on
another he maintained Papists to be much better subjects than
Presbyterians--as, indeed, from the Government's point of view they
certainly were. How far Peirson deserved this character we cannot surely
tell. The fact of his being hated by the Covenanters is not necessarily
to his discredit; but we may assume that he was not conciliatory in his
speech, that he meddled more in civil matters than became his cloth,
and, in short, was pro