she thought more about them than about anything else that ever happened to her—­and as often as she could get an ear and a heart into which to tell them, she always pictured to her audience and to herself the majestic Figure of the first chapter of the Revelation.  She often spoke of her rare outgates to David Dickson, and Robert Blair, and John Livingstone, and to her own Stewarton minister, Mr. Castlelaw, whose name written in water on earth is written in letters of gold in heaven.  ’Not much of a preacher himself, he encouraged his people to attend Mr. Dickson’s sermons, and he often employed Mr. Blair to preach at Stewarton, and accompanied him back and forward, singing psalms all the way.’  Her ladyship often told saintly Mr. Castlelaw of her rare outgates, and always so spoke to him of the Amen, who has the keys of hell and of death, that he never could read that chapter all his days without praising God that he had had the Lady Robertland and her rare outgates in his sin-sick parish.

But it is time to turn to some of those special and rare outgates that the Amen with the keys gave to His favoured handmaiden, the Lady Robertland; and the first kind of outgate, on account of which she was always such an astonishment to herself, was what she would call her outgate from providential disabilities, entanglements, and embarrassments.  She was wont to say to William Guthrie, who best understood her witty words and her wonderful history, that the wicked fairies had handicapped her infant feet in her very cradle.  She could use a freedom of speech with Guthrie, and he with her, such as neither of them could use with Livingstone or with Rutherford.  Rutherford could not laugh when his heart was breaking, as Lady Robertland and the witty minister of Fenwick were often overheard laughing.  ’Yes, but your Ladyship has won the race with all your weights,’ Guthrie would laugh and say.  ‘One of my many races,’ she would answer, with half a smile and half a sigh; ’but I have a long race, many long races, still before me.  It seemed conclamatum est with me,’ she would then say, quoting a well-known expression of Samuel Rutherford’s, which is, being interpreted, It’s all over and gone with me, ’but Providence, since the Amen took it in hand, has a thousand and more keys wherewith to give poor creatures like me our rare outgates.’  There were few alive by that time who had known Lady Robertland in her early days, and she seldom spoke of those days; only, on the anniversary of her early marriage, she never forgot her feelings when her life as a Fleming came to an end and her new life as a Robertland began.  There was a famous preacher of her day who sometimes spoke familiarly of the ’keys of the cupboard, that the Master carried at His girdle,’ and she used sometimes to take up his homely words and say that she had had all the sweetest morsels and most delicate dainties of earth’s cupboard taken out from under lock and key and put into her mouth.