One more river and we have done. The /Bladenoch/ is a small stream which passes by the town of Wigtown, and falls into Wigtown Bay, the broad estuary of the Cree river. In 1685 it was the scene of the greatest of the Covenanting tragedies, known in history as the death of the Wigtown martyrs. Woodrow, in his "History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland," tells the story. In the year noted there lived in the parish of Penninghame a substantial farmer named Gilbert Wilson, a law-abiding person who submitted to all the orders of the Government. He had three children: Gilbert sixteen, Margaret eighteen, and Agnes thirteen years of age. These, unlike their parents, would "by no means conform or hear the Episcopalian incumbent, but fled to the hills, bogs, and caves." The son went abroad, fought as a soldier in the Low Countries, and returned long after the Revolution. The daughters had come to Wigtown, where they were living with an old woman of the name of Margaret McLachlin. All three, being apprehended, were tried at Wigtown on various charges of nonconformity, the chief being their presence at twenty field conventicles. The facts were patent, the law clear, and it was adjudged that "all the three should be tied to stakes fixed within the floodmark in the water of Blednoch, near Wigtown, where the sea flows at high water, there to be drowned." (Drowning, one ought to explain, was the ordinary method of execution for women.) Gilbert Wilson hastened to Edinburgh, and procured, probably bought, a pardon for his younger daughter; then Margaret McLachlin was persuaded to sign a petition in which she promised to conform and besought the Lords of Privy Council to have mercy on her. But the passionate words of field preaching heard in lonely glens had sunk deep into Margaret Wilson's mind; she refused, as she would have said, "to bow the knee to Baal." She wrote a letter from prison to her friends "full of a deep and affecting sense of God's love to her soul, and in entire resignation to the Lord's disposal. She likewise added a vindication of her refusing to save her life by taking the abjuration and engaging conformity; against both she gave arguments with a solidity and judgment far above one of her years and education." [Illustration: _Photo: Poulton & Son, London._ THE DEE AT DOUGLAS TONGUELAND (_p. 322_).]