Covenanters -- Fiction; Historical fiction; Scotland -- History -- Stuarts, to the Union, 1371-1707 -- Fiction
As soon as the horsemen had gone by, Bailie Kilspinnie came from his
hiding-place, and both he and my grandfather proved that no bird-lime
was on their feet till they got to the ferry-house at the waterside,
where they found two boats taking passengers on board, one for Dundee
and the other for Perth. Here my grandfather's great gift of
foreknowledge was again proven, for he proposed that they should bargain
with the skipper of the Dundee boat to take them to that town and pay
him like the other passengers, at once, in an open manner, but that, as
the night was cloudy and dark, they should go cannily aboard the boat
for Perth, as it were in mistake, and feign not to discover their error
till they were far up the river when they should proceed to the town,
letting wot that by the return of the tide they would go in the morning
by the Perth boat to Dundee, with which Master Kilspinnie was well
acquainted, he having had many times, in the way of his traffic as a
plaiding merchant, cause to use the same, and thereby knew it went twice
a week, and that the morrow was one of the days. All this they were
enabled to do with such fortitude and decorum that no one aboard the
Perth boat could have divined that they were not honest men in great
trouble of mind at discovering they had come into the wrong boat.
But nothing showed more that Providence had a hand in all this than what
ensued, for all the passengers in the boat had been at St Andrews to
hear the trial and see the martyrdom, and they were sharp and vehement
not only in their condemnation of the mitred Antichrist, but grieved
with a sincere sorrow that none of the nobles of Scotland would stand
forth in their ancient bravery to resist and overthrow a race of
oppressors more grievous than the Southrons that trode on the neck of
their fathers in the hero-stirring times of the Wallace wight and King
Robert the Bruce. Truly, there was a spirit of unison and indignation in
the company on board that boat, everyone thirsting with a holy ardour to
avenge the cruelties of which the papistical priesthood were daily
growing more and more crouse in the perpetration, and they made the
shores ring with the olden song of--
"O for my ain king, quo' gude Wallace,
The rightfu' king of fair Scotlan';
Between me and my sovereign dear
I think I see some ill seed sawn."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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