In the meantime a rent had been made in the Covenant, partly by the over-zeal of certain young preachers, who, not feeling, as we did, that the duty of presbyterians went no farther than defence and resistance, strove, with all the pith of an effectual eloquence, to exasperate the minds of their hearers into hostility against those in authority; and it happened that several of those who had executed the judgment on James Sharp, seeing no hope of pardon for what they had done, leagued themselves with this party, in the hope of thereby making head against their pursuers. I have been the more strict in setting down these circumstantials, because in the bloody afterings of that meeting they were altogether lost sight of; and also because the implacable rage with which Claverhouse persecuted the Covenanters has been extenuated by some discreet historians, on the plea of his being an honourable officer, deduced from his soldierly worth elsewhere; whereas the truth is, that his cruelties in the shire of Ayr, and other of our western parts, were less the fruit of his instructions, wide and severe as they were, than of his own mortified vanity and malignant revenge. CHAPTER LXXI It was in the cool of the evening, on Saturday, the last day of May, when my brother came over to my house, where, with Michael, I had prepared myself to go with him to Loudon-hill. Our intent was to walk that night to Kilmarnock, and abide till the morning with our brother Jacob's widow, not having seen her for a long time. We had in the course of that day heard something of the publication of "The Declaration and Testimony," which, through the vehemence of the preachers before spoken of, had been rashly counselled at Ruglen, the twenty-ninth of the month; but there was no particulars, and what we did hear was like, as all such things are, greatly magnified beyond the truth. We, however, were grieved by the tidings; for we feared some cause of tribulation would be thereby engendered detrimental to the religious purposes of our journey. This sentiment pressing heavily on our hearts, we parted from my family with many misgivings, and the bodements of further sorrows. But the outward expression of what we all felt was the less remarkable, on account of what so lately had before happened in my brother's house. Nor indeed did I think at the time, that the foretaste of what was ordained so speedily to come to a head was at all so lively in his spirit, or that of my son, as it was in mine, till, in passing over the top of the Gowan-brae, he looked round on the lands of Quharist, and said,-- "I care nae, Ringan, if I ne'er come back; for though we hae lang dwelt in affection together yon'er, thae that were most precious to me are now both aneath the sod,"--alluding to his wife who had been several years dead,--and poor Bell, that lovely rose which the ruthless spoiler had so trampled into the earth.