Onward on her milk-white ass
Rideth the maiden Zanitas,
The boughs are sweet, the grass is pearl'd,
But 'tis a miserable world.
Dews are falling, song birds sing,
'Tis a Christian evening:
All over heaven her eyes can see
The glittering spots of Leprosy!

GIDEON BROWN.

A TRUE STORY OF THE COVENANT.

IN TWO CHAPTERS. CHAPTER II.

THREE months after the battle of Bothwell
Brigg, when I was in my warehouse
sorting a shipment of tobacco that I had
received from Virginia, a detachment of
Claverhouse's dragoons, consisting of six
men, stationed themselves at my door. The
captain in command entered, and with many
brutal words and oaths, arrested me for
having been at the battle, and called my wife
an ill name, when, rushing in between us,
she implored with piteous shrieks and heart-
rending entreaties that I should not be
taken from her. I was prepared for this
arrest; and had taken great and, as I
thought, sure, precautions to prove my
innocence. I was led off to prison, but
as I was a magistrate of Glasgow, it was
thought well not to treat me with too
much harshness. I lay in prison for five
days, when in consequence of representations
made by the Provost, and many
magistrates and citizens of repute, one of
whom, Mr. Wedderburn, was a strong
prelatist, who all deponed that I was in
Glasgow, attending quietly to my affairs
on the day of the battle, and that I had not
left the city for a week before or after, I
was allowed to return to my family. All
this time—though his enemies and mine
neither knew nor suspected it—Mr.
Cargill lay concealed in my house. He went
forth shortly afterwards, I knew not
whither, though I learned in about two
months by a letter in his own hand, that
he had retired into England, where he
was not known, until the violence of
the search after him should abate. A
reward of five thousand marks was offered
for him, dead or alive; and many greedy
malignants were on his track. He soon
returned to Scotland; and both he and the
venerated Mr. Richard Cameron preached
on the same Sabbath to the people
at Dermeid Moor. Mr. Cameron, when
preaching at Airs Moss, not long after
this, was surprised by the dragoons of
Claverhouse, for there was a reward of
five thousand marks for his head also—
and in the conflict Mr. Cameron was
slain. His head and hands were cut off
and sent to Edinburgh. Mr. Cargill,
nothing daunted by the fate of his brother
in the Lord, continued to preach wherever
he could safely gather the people
together, either on the Sabbath or any
other day. On the second Sabbath of
September, 1688, he preached to a large
congregation in the Torwood, between
Falkirk and Stirling. Of this congregation
I was one. It was the last time
that I was permitted to look upon the
face or listen to the words of that apostle
of the truth. He never preached better
during the whole course of his ministry,
and ended by pronouncing sentence of
ex-communication against the king and his
brother, the Duke of York, the base
begotten Monmouth, and the persecuting
Scottish malignants, Lauderdale, Rothes,
Claverhouse, Dalzell, and others. He had
a presentiment at this time that he and I
would never meet again, and he took leave of
me with the tears in his eyes, and a fatherly
kiss upon my cheek. His presentiment was
a prophecy. After eight months of peril and
of hairbreadth escapes he was captured
by one Irving of Bonshaw, who tied him
tight with cords to the back of a horse,
and otherwise despitefully used him, and
conveyed him first to Lanark and thence
to Glasgow, where he remained one night
in the Tolbooth. He was soon thereafter
tried for high treason, for having fought
at Bothwell Brigg, and for having
absolved the people from their allegiance to
Charles Stuart on the ever-memorable
Sabbath in Torwood. He was tried on the
15th of July, and the judge, the malignant
Duke of Rothes, himself an aged man, but
no respecter of grey hairs, spoke wrathfully
and cruelly to the venerable saint, and
threatened him with torture, saying that
if he were rolled down-hill in a barrel
set with sharp spikes of iron, or fastened
to the stake with red-hot chains, such a
death would be too good for him. But
Mr. Cargill very quietly said, as I was
afterwards told by one who was present: "I am
in your power, my Lord of Rothes, but you
need not threaten me. And die what death
I may, your eyes will not live to see it."
This was thought by many to be a foolish
speech. But it came to pass. Mr. Cargill
was ordered for execution, and was hanged
and afterwards beheaded, at the Nether
Bow, Edinburgh, in the afternoon of the
26th of July. In the morning of that same
day died the Duke of Rothes. Great are
the judgments of the Lord, who yet
speaketh by the mouths of His martyrs!
And now the day of my own tribulation