under their charge to conform to the episcopal government and ritual. It was not the intention of those who had instigated this coercive and penal legislation that it should remain a dead letter. As a means of enforcing obedience to it and of levying the fines imposed upon those who would not yield dutiful submission, troops were sent into the discontented districts. The south-western counties, in which the Covenanters were most numerous and most determined, were entrusted to Sir James Turner. His orders were to punish recalcitrant families by quartering his men on them, and, if they remained obstinate, to distrain their goods and gear, and to sell them in discharge of the fines incurred. It was the carrying out of these instructions that first led to armed resistance on the part of the Covenanters. The immediate cause of the rising, however, is conflictingly stated by different writers. Kirkton’s version of the occurrence, which has been reproduced almost literally by Wodrow, is to the effect that, on the 13th of November 1666, four of the men who had abandoned their homes on the appearance of the military, coming, in the course of their wanderings, towards the old clachan of Dalry, in Galloway, to seek refreshment after long fasting, providentially met, upon the highway, three or four soldiers driving before them a company of people, for the purpose of compelling them to thresh the corn of a poor old neighbour of theirs, who had also fled from his house, and from whom the church fines, as they were called, were to be exacted in this way. ‘This,’ says Kirkton, ‘troubled the poor countrymen very much, yet they passed it in silence, till, coming to the house where they expected refreshment, they were informed the soldiers had seized the poor old man, and were about to bind him and set him bare upon a hot iron gird-iron, there to torment him in his own house. Upon this they ran to relieve the poor man, and coming to his house, desired the soldiers to let the poor man go, which the soldiers refused, and so they fell to words; whereupon two of the soldiers rushing out of the chamber with drawn swords, and making at the countrymen, had almost killed two of them behind their backs, and unawares; the countrymen having weapons, one of them discharged his pistol, and hurt one of the soldiers with the piece of a tobacco pipe with which he had loaded his pistol instead of ball. This made the soldiers deliver their arms and prisoner.’