[Footnote A:  In the year 1684, Peden, one of the Cameronian preachers, about ten o’clock at night, sitting at the fire-side, started up to his feet, and said, “Flee, auld Sandie (thus he designed himself), and hide yourself! for colonel——­is coming to this house to apprehend you; and I advise you all to do the like, for he will be here within an hour;” which came to pass:  and when they had made a very narrow search, within and without the house, and went round the thorn-bush, under which he was lying praying, they went off without their prey.  He came in, and said, “And has this gentleman (designed by his name) given poor Sandie, and thir poor things, such a fright?  For this night’s work, God shall give him such a blow, within a few days, that all the physicians on earth shall not be able to cure;” which came to pass, for he died in great misery.—­Life of Alexander Peden.]

[Footnote B:  See the life of this booted apostle of prelacy, written by Swift, who had collected all his anecdotes of persecution, and appears to have enjoyed them accordingly.]

[Footnote C:  “They raved,” says Peden’s historian, “like fleshly devils, when the mist shrouded from their pursuit the wandering whigs.”  One gentleman closed a declaration of vengeance against the conventiclers with this strange imprecation, “Or may the devil make my ribs a gridiron to my soul!”—­MS. Account of the Presbytery of Penpont. Our armies swore terribly in Flanders, but nothing to this!]

In truth, extremes always approach each other; and the superstition of the Roman catholics was, in some degree, revived, even by their most deadly enemies.  They are ridiculed by the cavaliers, as wearing the relics of their saints by way of amulet:—­

  “She shewed to me a box, wherein lay hid
  The pictures of Cargil and Mr Kid;
  A splinter of the tree, on which they were slain;
  A double inch of Major Weir’s best cane;
  Rathillet’s sword, beat down to table-knife,
  Which took at Magus’ Muir a bishop’s life;
  The worthy Welch’s spectacles, who saw,
  That windle-straws would fight against the law;
  They, windle-straws, were stoutest of the two,
  They kept their ground, away the prophet flew;
  And lists of all the prophets’ names were seen
  At Pentland Hills, Aird-Moss, and Rullen Green. 
    “Don’t think,” she says, “these holy things are foppery;
  They’re precious antidotes against the power of popery.”
      The Cameronian Tooth.—­Pennycuick’s Poems, p. 110.

The militia and standing army soon became unequal to the task of enforcing conformity, and suppressing conventicles In, their aid, and to force compliance with a test proposed by government, the Highland clans were raised, and poured down into Ayrshire.[A] An armed host of undisciplined mountaineers, speaking a different language, and professing, many of them, another religion, were let loose, to ravage and plunder this unfortunate