Another class of stories deals with the stormy lives and unfortunate ends of the persecutors, and there is no name among those more prominent than that of the Archbishop of St. Andrews, him whom Presbyterian Scotland held in horror as Sharp, the Judas, the Apostate. Years before his life closed at Magus Muir he went in continual danger; he was believed to be in direct league with the devil. Once he accused a certain Janet Douglas before the Privy Council of sorcery and witchcraft, and suggested that she should be packed off to the King’s plantations in the West Indies. “My Lord,” said Janet, “who was you with in your closet on Saturday night last betwixt twelve and one o’clock?” The councillors pricked up their ears in delighted anticipation of a peculiarly piquant piece of scandal about a Reverend Father in God. Sharp turned all colours and put the question by. The Duke of Rothes called Janet aside and, by promise of pardon and safety, unloosed Janet’s probably not very reluctant lips. “My lord, it was the muckle black Devil.” Here is a strange episode of this troubled time. Patrick Walker in his record of the life and death of Mr. Donald Cargill tells of a sect called the sweet singers, “from their frequently meeting together and singing those tearful Psalms over the mournful case of the Church.” To many of the persecuted it seemed incredible that heaven should not declare in some terrible manner vengeance on a community that was guilty of the blood of the Saints, and as this little band sang and mused it seemed ever clearer to them that the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah must fall on the wicked city of Edinburgh. They needs must flee from the wrath to come, and so with one accord “they left their Houses, warm soft Beds, covered Tables, some of them their Husbands and Children weeping upon them to stay with them, some women taking the sucking Children in their arms” (to leave _these_ behind were a counsel of perfection too high even for a saint!) “to Desert places to be free of all Snares and Sins and communion with others and mourn for their own sins, the Land’s Tyranny and Defections, and there be safe from the Land’s utter ruin and Desolations by Judgments. Some of them going to Pentland hills with a Resolution to sit there to see the smoke and utter ruin of the sinful, bloody City of Edinburgh.” The heavens made no sign; Edinburgh remained unconsumed. A troop of dragoons were sent to seize the sweet singers; the men were put in the Canongate Tolbooth, the women into the House of Correction where they were soundly scourged. Their zeal thus being quenched they were allowed to depart one by one, the matter settled. And so let us pass on to a less tragic and heroic, a more peaceful and prosaic time.