ere denied them, to take
the law into their own hands and personally chastise Carmichael.
Accordingly, hearing that the commissioner was hunting on the moors in
the neighbourhood of Cupar, they rode off in search of him. They failed
to find him, and were about to disperse, when a boy brought intelligence
that the coach of Archbishop Sharp was approaching.

Baffled in their previous search, and smarting under the sense of their
intolerable wrongs, the party regarded this as a providential
deliverance of their arch-enemy into their hands. Here was the chief
cause of all their woes, the man who, more almost than any other, had
been instrumental in the persecution and ruin of many families, in the
torture and death of innumerable innocent men and women, and the
banishment of some of their nearest and dearest to perpetual exile on
the plantations, where they were treated as slaves. They leaped at the
sudden and unexpected opportunity. They reasoned that what had been
done in the past, and was being done at the time, would continue to be
done in the future, for there was no symptom of improvement, but rather
of increasing severity in the Government and ecclesiastics. Overtaking
the coach, which contained the Prelate and his daughter, they stopped
it, made Archbishop Sharp step out, and slew him there on Magus Moor.

It was a dark unwarrantable deed, but it was unpremeditated, and
necessarily unknown, at first, to any but the perpetrators, so that it
would be inexcusably unfair to saddle it upon the great body of the
Covenanters, who, as far as we can ascertain from their writings and
opinions, condemned it, although, naturally, they could not but feel
relieved to think that one of their chief persecutors was for evermore
powerless for further evil, and _some_ of them refused to admit that the
deed was murder. They justified it by the case of Phinehas. A better
apology lies in the text, "oppression maketh a wise man mad."

This event had the effect, apparently, of causing the Council to forget
our friends Black and Ramblin' Peter for a time, for they were left in
the Tolbooth for about three weeks after that, whereat Andrew was much
pleased, for it gave his maimed limb time to recover. As Peter remarked
gravely, "it's an ill wund that blaws naebody guid!"

A robust and earnest nation cannot be subdued by persecution. The more
the Council tyrannised over and trampled upon the liberties of the
people of Scotland, the