Out of a compassion for me the mistress warmed and spiced a pint of ale; but instead of doing me any good, I had not long partaken of the same when I experienced a great coldness and a trembling in my limbs, in so much that I felt myself very ill, and prayed the kind woman to allow me to lie down in a bed; which she consented to do in a most charitable manner, causing her husband, who was a covenanted man, as I afterwards found, to rise out of his, and give me their own. The cold and the tremblings were but the symptoms and beginnings of a sore malady, which soon rose to such a head that Robin Brown taiglet more than two hours for me; but still I grew worse and worse, and could not be removed for many days. On the fifth I was brought so nigh unto the gates of death that my son, who never left the bed-stock, thought at one time I had been released from my troubles. But I was reserved for the task that the Lord had in store for me, and from that time I began to recover; and nothing could exceed the tenderness wherewith I was treated by those Samaritan Christians, the landlord and his wife of the public at Kingswell. This distemper, however, left a great imbecility of body behind it; and I wondered whether it could be of providence to prevent me from going forward with my avenging purpose against Charles Stuart and his counsellors. Being one day in this frame of dubiety, lying in the bed, and my son sitting at my pillow, I said to him, "Get THE BOOK and open, and read," which he accordingly did; and the first verse that he cast his eye upon was the twenty-fourth of the seventh chapter of Isaiah, "With arrows and with bows shall men come." "Stop" said I, "and go to the window and see who are coming;" but when he went thither and looked out he could see no one far nor near. Yet still I heard the tramp of many feet, and I said to him, "Assuredly, Joseph, there are many persons coming towards this house, and I think they are not men of war, for their steps are loose, and they march not in the order of battle." This I have thought was a wonderful sharpness of hearing with which I was for a season then gifted; for soon after a crowd of persons were discovered coming over the moor towards the house, and it proved to be Mr Cargill, with about some sixty of the Cameronians, who had been hunted from out their hiding-places in the south. CHAPTER LXXIX