* * * *

Of moral honestie they’re clean,
Nought like religion they retain;
In nothing they’re accounted sharp,
Except in bag-pipe, and in harp;
For a misobliging word,
She’ll durk her neighbour o’er the boord,
And then she’ll flee like fire from flint,
She’ll scarcely ward the second dint;
If any ask her of her thrift. 
Forsooth her nainsell lives by thift.

    Cleland’s Poems, Edin. 1697, p. 12.

[Footnote C:  It was, and is believed, that the devil furnished his favourites, among the persecutors, with what is called proof against leaden bullets, but against those only.  During the battle of Pentland-hills Paton of Meadowhead conceived he saw the balls hop harmlessly down from General Dalziel’s boots, and, to counteract the spell, loaded his pistol with a piece of silver coin.  But Dalziel, having his eye on him, drew back behind his servant, who was shot dead.—­Paton’s Life. At a skirmish, in Ayrshire, some of the wanderers defended themselves in a sequestered house, by the side of a lake.  They aimed repeatedly, but in vain, at the commander of the assailants, an English officer, until, their ammunition running short, one of them loaded his piece with the ball at the head of the tongs, and succeeded in shooting the hitherto impenetrable captain.  To accommodate Dundee’s fate to their own hypothesis, the Cameronian tradition runs, that, in the battle of Killicrankie, he fell, not by the enemy’s fire, but by the pistol of one of his own servants, who, to avoid the spell, had loaded it with a silver button from his coat.  One of their writers argues thus:  “Perhaps, some may think this, anent proof-shot, a paradox, and be ready to object here, as formerly concerning Bishop Sharpe and Dalziel—­How can the devil have, or give, power to save life?  Without entering upon the thing in its reality, I shall only observe, 1.  That it is neither in his power, or of his nature, to be a saviour of men’s lives; he is called Apollyon, the destroyer. 2.  That, even in this case, he is said only to give enchantment against one kind of metal, and this does not save life:  for, though lead could not take Sharpe and Claverhouse’s lives, yet steel and silver could do it; and, for Dalziel, though he died not on the field, yet he did not escape the arrows of the Almighty.”—­God’s Judgement against Persecutors. If the reader be not now convinced of the thing in its reality, I have nothing to add to such exquisite reasoning.]

John Balfour of Kinloch, commonly called Burly, was one of the fiercest of the proscribed sect.  A gentleman by birth, he was, says his biographer, “zealous and honest-hearted, courageous in every enterprise, and a brave soldier, seldom any escaping that came in his hands.” Life of John Balfour. Creichton says, that he was once chamberlain to Archbishop Sharpe, and, by negligence, or dishonesty, had incurred