From that hour her image had a dear place in my grandfather's bosom, and after the settlement of the Reformation throughout the realm, he courted her, and she became his wife, and in process of time my grandmother. But of her manifold excellencies I shall have occasion to speak more at large hereafter, for she was no ordinary woman, but a saint throughout life, returning in a good old age to her Maker, almost as blameless as she came from His pure hands; and nothing became her more in all her piety, than the part she acted towards her guilty sister. Having taken away the children, she then brought in divers refreshments, and a flagon of posset; but she remained not with the bailie and my grandfather while they partook thereof; so that they were left free to converse as they listed, and my grandfather was glad to find, as I have already said, that the poor man had triumphed over his fond grief, and was reconciled to his misfortunes as well as any father could well be, with so many deserted babies, and three of them daughters. He likewise learnt, with no less solace and satisfaction, that the Reformed were strong in Crail, and that the magistrates and beinest burgesses had been present on the day before at the preaching of John Knox, and had afterwards suffered the people to demolish the images and all the monuments of papistry, without molestation or hinderance; so that the town was cleansed of the pollution of idolatry, and the worship of humble and contrite hearts established there, instead of the pagan pageantry of masses and altars. After the repast was finished, the bailie conducted my grandfather to the house where John Knox then lodged, to whom he communicated his message from the Lord James Stuart. "Tell your master," was the reply of the Reformer, "that I will be with him, God willing; and God is willing, for this invitation, and the state of men's minds, maketh His will manifest. Yea, I was minded myself to go thither; for that same city of St Andrews is the Zion of Scotland. Of old, the glad tidings of salvation were first heard there,--there, amidst the damps and the darkness of ages, the ancient Culdees, men whose memory is still fragrant for piety and purity of faith and life, supplied the oil of the lamp of the living God for a period of four hundred years, independent of pope, prelate, or any human supremacy. There it was that a spark of their blessed embers was, in our own day, first blown into a flame,--and there, please God, where I, His unworthy instrument, was condemned as a criminal for His truth's sake, shall I, in His strength, be the herald of His triumph and great victory." CHAPTER XXI