“Do the reprobate know what they say, or can they forbear? How then can I? I, who am in the bond of iniquity, and the jaws of death eternal?—Where can I fly? When the righteous are not saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?—Ay, dear bairn, weel may ye stare and raise up your hands that gate; but when ye hear my tale, ye winna wonder that my poor wits are uprooted. Suppose sic a case your ain—suppose you had been the bosom companion o’ ane for twenty years—had joined wi’ him in devotion, e’ening and morning, for a’ that time, and had never heard a sigh but for sin, nor a complaint but of the iniquities of the land—If ye had witnessed him follow two comely sons, your own flesh and blood, to the scaffold, and bless his God who put it in their hearts to stand and suffer for his cause, and for the crown of martyrdom he had bestowed on them, and bury the mangled bodies of other two with tears, but not with repining—If, after a’ this, he had been hunted as a partridge on the mountains, and for the same dear cause, the simplicity of the truth as it is in Jesus, had laid down his life—If you knew that his grey head was hung upon the city wall for a spectacle to gaze at, and his trunk buried in the wild by strangers—Say you knew all this, and had all these dear ties in your remembrance, and yet, after long years of hope soon to join their blest society above, to see again that loved and revered form stand before your eyes on earth at midnight, shrivelled, pale, and deformed, and mixed with malevolent spirits on dire and revengeful intent, where wad your hope—where wad your confidence—or where wad your wits hae been flown?” Here she cried bitterly; and seizing the astonished Katharine’s hand with both hers, and pressing it to her brow, she continued her impassioned and frantic strain.—“Pity me, O dear bairn, pity me! For man hasna pitied me, an’ God hasna pitied me! I’m gaun down a floody water, down, down; an’ I wad fain grip at something, if it were but a swoomin strae, as a last hope, or I sink a’ thegither.”