and left, but they touched vacancy, and the ghostly footsteps ceased. On, and on, ... until a heavy languor stole over me and filled me with the hunger of sleep. My eyelids drooped, so that for an instant I did not see the ground before me, and I stumbled and almost fell. I sprang erect and shook myself. Sleep meant death--not for myself, but for thousands of others who had grown to be dear to me, and on and on I ran. But the things that a man would do are conditioned by the strength which God has given him, and the body, though an obedient slave to the mind, sometimes becomes a tyrant. My limbs were heavy--no longer things of flesh and blood, but compact of lead. On, and on ... knowing nothing now but that my task was a sacred one, deaf to the sound of my own footsteps, blind to the things around me, on and on I reeled till sleep or something akin to it, seized me, and for a time I raced on unconscious of what I did. Stumbling, I fell to spring up again wildly alert. I should win through or die! On and on--and on and on ... till I sank helpless to the ground. I slept: I dreamed:-- It was a peaceful Sabbath day. In a hollow among the hills above Closeburn a great gathering of men and women and children was assembled to keep the feast. On a low table covered with a fair white cloth stood the sacred elements. Behind the table I saw my friend of the cave at the Linn standing with a look of rapture on his face. The gathered people were singing a psalm, when, suddenly, there was a loud alarm. The posted sentinels came hot-foot with cruel tidings on their lips. But it was too late. From north and south and east and west, on horses at the gallop, poured the dragoons--Claver’se’s men, Lag’s men, Winram’s men, Dalzell’s men, all with the blood-lust in their eyes--and in a moment that peaceful hollow was a bloody shambles. Muskets rattled on every side; men, women and children fell. Through and through that defenceless company the wild troopers rode, spurring their horses to their sickening task, trampling the women and children underfoot, shooting the men with their bullets or beating them down with the stocks of their muskets. Screams and wild blasphemy rent the air that but a moment before had been fragrant with the melodies of love and adoration. Lag himself I saw spur his charger over a tangled mass of dead and dying right at the sacred table. The horse leaped, spurning to the ground the Bread and Wine, and the man of blood, swinging his sword high, brought it down upon the head of the sainted minister, who fell cleft to the chin. And I, by whose failure such deeds of blood had been made possible, lay bound, a prisoner, hand and foot. *CHAPTER XXXVII* *"OUT OF THE SNARE OF THE FOWLERS"*