was heard to cry that Argyll might well shrink from the man he had not dared to face for seven years.[26] So dense was the crowd and so slow the pace of the procession that it was seven o'clock before the Tolbooth was reached. As the prisoner passed through the Nether Bow Port and entered within the city walls, the last hope that he might at least be spared the ignominious death reserved for the lowest criminals must have vanished. Before his eyes a monstrous gibbet rose to the height of thirty feet from a scaffold covered with black cloth. It rose close by the old city cross, the spot, as his memory must have recalled with peculiar bitterness, where his young and ardent enthusiasm had first displayed itself before the admiring eyes of so many who were now clamouring for his blood. Scarcely had Montrose entered the prison when a deputation from the Parliament arrived to interrogate him. At first he refused to speak with them until he was assured that they had made their peace with the King and had warrant to examine him. Being satisfied on this point, he asked that he might be left to rest for the present. He was tired, he said, with a long journey; and "the compliment they had put upon him that day was something tedious." But there was to be little rest for him. All through Sunday and the early hours of Monday, the ministers persecuted him, by order of the General Assembly, with a relation of his manifold misdemeanours and assurances of his certain damnation unless he would confess and receive the absolution of the Kirk. His capital offence in their eyes was his breach of the Covenant. That he stoutly denied. "The Covenant which I took," he said, "I own it and adhere to it. Bishops, I care not for them. I never intended to advance their interest. But when the King had granted you all your desires, and you were every one sitting under his vine and under his fig-tree,--that then you should have taken a party in England by the hand, and entered into a League and Covenant with them against the King, was the thing I judged my duty to oppose to the yondmost." They told him then that, as he still persisted in his stubbornness, they had no power to remit his sentence of excommunication, and must leave him to the judgment of the Almighty, "with the fearful apprehension that what is bound on earth God will bind in Heaven." "I am very sorry," he answered, "that any actions of mine have been offensive to the Church of Scotland, and I would, with all my heart, be reconciled to the same. But since I cannot obtain it on any other terms--unless I call that my sin which I account to have been my duty--I cannot for all the reason and conscience in the world."