He had not been in the house above three hours when a party of soldiers visited the cave, and not finding him there, they searched first the barn, and next the house, stabbing the beds, but they did not enter the place where he lay. Peden died on the 28th of January, 1686, being upwards of sixty years of age, and was privately buried in the church of Auchinleck, in the aisle of David Boswell, Esq., of Auchinleck. But his ashes were not allowed to repose in peace. Though he had never been condemned by any jury, yet the enemy, being informed of his death and burial, sent a troop of dragoons, who pulled his corpse out of the grave after it had lain about six weeks, and having first broken the chest, exposed his remains to contempt, and then carried them to the gallows foot at Cumnock, two miles distant, and there buried them. The design of the soldiers in lifting the body was to hang it in chains upon the gallows at Cumnock, but this they were prevented from doing. The Countess of Dumfries and the Lady Affleck, shocked at this barbarity, earnestly interceded that the body might be again buried; and when the savage commander of the dragoons, determined to have it hung in chains, proved unrelenting, they applied to the Earl of Dumfries, a Privy Councillor, then at home, who, yielding to their request, went to the gibbet and told Murray that it was erected for malefactors and murderers, and not for such men as Mr. Peden. The corpse was accordingly reinterred at the foot of the gibbet, now within the wall of the common burial-ground of Cumnock parish, and a suitable memorial erected over the remains, on which was inscribed an appropriate epitaph. A DAY'S WORK.