"I am an older man by far than you are, and I will never see the three-score and ten again. As my days so has my strength been. I have seen a feck of things and taken part in many a deed that will help to make history. You may think I boast myself, but listen. My name is Alexander Main, and, as you ken, I am a minister of the Kirk of Scotland. The year 1638 saw me a student in the Glasgow College--that is long syne, and they were stirring times. Ye may have heard of that great gathering in the Greyfriars Kirk at Edinburgh on the last day of February 1638, when we swore and put our names to the National Covenant. It was a great day. The crowd filled kirk and yard. Well do I mind the gallant Warriston reading the Covenant, much of which had come glowing from his own pen--but most of all I mind the silence that fell upon us when the reading was over. Then the good Earl of Sutherland stepped forward and put his name to it, and man followed man, each eager to pledge himself to the bond. Some of us, I mind well, wrote after their names the words ’Till death,’ and others signed it with their blood." "And what might this Covenant be?" I asked. "Ah," he said, "I had forgotten. Briefly the bond was this: ’to adhere to and defend the true religion of Presbyterianism, and to labour to recover the purity and liberty of the Gospel as it was established and professed in the Kingdom of Scotland.’ It was to put an end to all endeavours to foist prelacy upon us and to signify our adherence to the Presbyterian form of Church-government which King James himself had sworn to uphold in this Kingdom of Scotland, that we put our names to the bond. Not that we were against the King, for in the Covenant it was written plain that we were ready with our lives to stand to the defence of our dread sovereign, the King’s Majesty. The wave of fervour spread like a holy fire from that old kirkyard through the length and breadth of Scotland, and the noblest blood in the land and the flower of its intellect signed the Covenant. Later on there came a day when those who stood for liberty of conscience in England as well as Scotland made a compact. That was the Solemn League and Covenant, whereby we bound ourselves to preserve a reformed religion in the Church of Scotland. The memory of man is short, and it has almost been forgotten that the solemn league was a joint Scottish and English affair, and that it was ratified by the English Parliament. These things were the beginning, but since then this puir kingdom has passed through the fire."