me.”  She said, “Indeed, John, I can willingly part with you.”—­“Then,” he said, “this is all I desire, I have no more to do but die.”  He kissed his wife and bairns, and wished purchased and promised blessings to be multiplied upon them, and his blessing.  Clavers ordered six soldiers to shoot him; the most part of the bullets came upon his head, which scattered his brains upon the ground.  Claverhouse said to his wife, “What thinkest thou of thy husband now, woman?” She said, “I thought ever much of him, and now as much as ever.”  He said, “It were justice to lay thee beside him.”  She said, “If ye were permitted, I doubt not but your cruelty would go that length; but how will ye make answer for this morning’s work?” He said, “To man I can be answerable; and for God, I will take him in my own hand.”  Claverhouse mounted his horse, and marched, and left her with the corpse of her dead husband lying there; she set the bairn on the ground, and gathered his brains, and tied up his head, and straighted his body, and covered him in her plaid, and sat down, and wept over him.  It being a very desart place, where never victual grew, and far from neighbours, it was some time before any friends came to her; the first that came was a very fit hand, that old singular Christian woman, in the Cummerhead, named Elizabeth Menzies, three miles distant, who had been tried with the violent death of her husband at Pentland, afterwards of two worthy sons, Thomas Weir, who was killed at Drumclog, and David Steel, who was suddenly shot afterwards when taken.  The said Marion Weir, sitting upon her husband’s grave, told me, that before that, she could see no blood but she was in danger to faint; and yet she was helped to be a witness to all this, without either fainting or confusion, except when the shots were let off her eyes dazzled.  His corpse were buried at the end of his house, where he was slain, with this inscription on his grave-stone:—­

  In earth’s cold bed, the dusty part here lies,
  Of one who did the earth as dust despise! 
  Here, in this place, from earth he took departure;
  Now, he has got the garland of the martyrs.

[Footnote A:  The enthusiasm of this personage, and of his followers, invested him, as has been already noticed, with prophetic powers; but hardly any of the stories told of him exceeds that sort of gloomy conjecture of misfortune, which the precarious situation of his sect so greatly fostered.  The following passage relates to the battle of Bothwell-bridge:—­“That dismal day, 22d of June, 1679, at Bothwell-bridge, when the Lord’s people fell and fled before the enemy, he was forty miles distant, near the border, and kept himself retired until the middle of the day, when some friends said to him, ’Sir, the people are waiting for sermon,’ He answered, ’Let them go to their prayers; for me, I neither can nor will preach any this day, for our friends are fallen and fled before the enemy, at Hamilton, and they are