The castle of Edinburgh may well be deemed the cradle of the Cameronian Regiment, which received its first 'baptism of fire' amid the fierce and protracted siege endured there by the loyal and gallant Duke of Gordon in 1689. The corps, though now Cameronians but in name, have in that title a glorious inheritance of Scottish and military history, that springs from Richard Cameron's bloody grave in lone and wild Airs Moss, where he fell with Bible and sword in hand, in defence of an 'oppressed Kirk and broken Covenant,' and fell bravely, with his face to the enemy, in July, 1680. As a ballad says: 'Oh, weary, weary was the lot of Scotland's true ones then, A famine-stricken remnant with scarce the guise of men; They burrowed, few and lonely, in the chill, dark mountain caves, For those who once had sheltered them were in their martyr-graves!' When the landing of William of Orange became known in the West of Scotland, a great body of Cameronians assembled on a holm near the village of Douglas, in Lanarkshire, and, to the number of some thousands, joined the revolted troops who besieged King James's garrison in Edinburgh Castle during the winter of 1688. Out of these, two regiments, now respectively the 25th, and 26th or Cameronians, were constituted in the March and April of the following year. The latter stipulated that their officers should be exclusively men 'such as, in conscience,' they could submit to, as staunch Presbyterians, and great care was taken in the selection of them, while an 'elder' was appointed to every company, so that the whole battalion should be precisely under the moral discipline of a parish, and a Bible formed a part of the necessaries in every private's knapsack. 'It is impossible,' says the Domestic Annalist of Scotland, 'to read the accounts that are given of this Cameronian Regiment without sympathising with the earnestness of purpose, the conscientious scruples and heroic feeling of self-devotion under which it was established, and seeing in them demonstrations of what is highest and best in the Scottish character.' Their first colonel was James, Earl of Angus, heir of the lordly line of Douglas, who fell at their head in his twenty-second year, at Steinkirk, but a mullet, or five pointed star, in memory of him, is still one of the badges of the regiment. Their first lieutenant-colonel, Clelland, an accomplished soldier and poet, who had fought under the banner of the Covenant at Drumclog and Bothwell, fell at their head, defending Dunkeld; and their first chaplain was Alexander Shiells, a well-known Scottish divine.