"It's the head and the hand beside it, that has but twa fingers left, on the Kirkgate end o' the shelf!" replied a person in the crowd, whom I knew at once by his voice to be Willy Sutherland the hangman, although I had not seen him from the night of my evasion. And here let me not forget to set down the Christian worth and constancy of that simple and godly creature, who, rather than be instrumental in the guilty judgment by which John M'Coul and his fellow-sufferer were doomed to die, did himself almost endure martyrdom, and yet never swerved in his purpose, nor was abated in his integrity, in so much, that when questioned thereafter anent the same by the Earl of Eglinton, and his Lordship, being moved by the simplicity of his piety, said, "Poor man, you did well in not doing what they would have had you to do." "My Lord," replied Willy, "you are speaking treason! and yet you persecute to the uttermost, which shows that you go against the light of your conscience." "Do you say so to me, after I kept you from being hanged?" said his Lordship. "Keep me from being drowned, and I will still tell you the verity." The which honesty in that poor man begat for him a compassionate regard that the dignities of many great and many noble in that time could never command. When the sorrowful M'Couls had indulged themselves in their melancholy contemplation, they went away, followed by the multitude with silence and sympathy, till they had mounted upon the cart which they had brought with them into the town. But from that time every one began to speak of the impiety of leaving the bones so wofully exposed; and after the skirmish at Drumclog, where Robin M'Coul, the eldest of the two striplings above spoken of, happened to be, when Mr John Welsh, with the Carrick men that went to Bothwell-brigg, was sent into Glasgow to bury the heads and hands of the martyrs there, Robin M'Coul came with a party of his friends to Irvine to bury his father's bones. I was not myself present at the interment, being, as I have narrated, confined to my bed by reason of my wound. But I was told by the neighbours, that it was a very solemn and affecting scene. The grieved lad carried the relics of his father in a small box in his hands, covered with a white towel; and the godly inhabitants of the town, young and old, and of all denominations, to the number of several hundreds, followed him to the grave where the body was lying; and Willy Sutherland, moved by a simple sorrow, was the last of all; and he walked, as I was told, alone, behind, with his bonnet in his hand; for, from his calling, he counted himself not on an equality with other men. But it is time that I should return from this digression to the main account of my narrative. CHAPTER LXXIII