necessary that I explain to you. They are known to themselves. I have friends at court. This night, with Mr. Monnypenny, I leave Edinburgh for London. Till I return hope,farewell."

He was gone. Heavily the iron-bound door turned on its hinges, and once more I was alone.

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CHAPTER XVIII.

A RESPITE.

POWERFUL though I knew the interest of Mr. Innes to be with the council and court, and sanguine though he was that the application he was about to make to the latter would be successful, I had not the least hope that it would. Life had now ceased, indeed, in a great measure with me to be desirable, and death had long ceased to be dreadful. Now that, in one of its most appalling aspects, it was actually confronting me, it was even less so than ever. Nor in all my life, even when sleeping in childhood beneath the sunshine of a mother's smile, had I. enjoyed greater serenity of soul than I did that evening, when, with heavy irons on my limbs, I lay down on the cold floor of my dungeon, and slept under the sentence and the shadow of death. Let none then, into whose hands this memorial of a sufferer for Christ's crown and covenant may come, scar at any service, suffering, and sacrifice they may be summoned to undergo and endure for Christ's sake. It is not the water that surrounds the ship, and in which it swims, that sinks it, it is what enters it. It is not the chains on the prisoner's limbs-it is not his dark and damp dungeon-it is not his wretched garb or his meagre fare-it is not the loathsome spectacles that he sees, or the polluted air that he breathes,--it is not these things that

can make him miserable; let him be but innocent-give him but the consciousness of this, that he is suffering for "righteousness sake"that he is not a malefactor but a martyr-then though his eye may grow dim, and his head droop, and his flesh waste, till the very irons themselves fall from around him, this consciousness will sustain him-it will bear him up-it will carry him through-yea, on its wings of power, like an eagle, he will mount up in spirit, so that while outwardly he appears to be struggling amid clouds and storms, in reality he is dwelling amid the calm and sunshine of heaven.

Such has been the experience of those who have suffered for the sake of truth and righteousness in all ages, and never more than at this present day, as the clefts and the caves in which God's broken and bleeding remnant in Scotland for these twenty years have lain concealed, the moors and mountains on which they have wandered, the dungeons in which they have pined, and the scaffolds on which they have perished, had they tongues, in a voice loud as thunder, would proclaim. Such, I can testify, has been mine; and so long as it is written, "As thy day is, so shall thy strength be," and so long as there is any harmony between the sayings of the Scriptures and the findings of the saints, such will be their experience—an experience that shall never cease to be uttered by the living, and to break from the pale triumphant lips of the dying.

My time was now spent in preparation for death. Conformably to the practice of other sufferers, I drew up a paper entitled my "Dying Testimony," in which I declared my adherence to God's holy and eternal Word, as the only rule of faith and manners-to the Westminster Con

fession of Faith-Catechisms, Larger and Shorter -the Covenants, National and Solemn League, with their binding and descending obligations on posterity--the Acts of the free and reforming General Assemblies, and all the faithful contendings of the period for a covenanted work of reformation and to all the truths of doctrine, worship, government, and discipline, contained in the standards of the Church of Scotland, which have been struggled for on fields, confessed and sealed with blood, at stakes and on scaffolds. I recorded my protest against Popery and Prelacy, and the claim of supremacy as a sacrilegious invasion of the rights of Christ, the sole King and Head of the Church; for the daring and blasphemous assertion of which, I recorded my belief that God would cut off the name⚫ of Stuart, and give the crown and sceptre of these lands to another. In fine, I recorded my witness for the cross of Christ, declaring-a declaration, after years of solitary confinement, amidst this waste of waters, I am as willing to make in the Bass Rock as I was in the tolbooth of Edinburgh-that his cause was well worth the quitting every thing for; and that, if I had as many lives as there are hairs on my head, I would willingly lay them all down for his sake. In the composition of this paper, which is drawn up at considerable length, and in exercises suitable to a dying man, day after day passed away, and to all human appearance my time on earth was fast drawing to a close.

Mr. Innes had not yet returned, nor had Mrs. Rowallan heard from him, though he had promised to write her from London, a few days after his arrival there. From his silence, what could be inferred but that his application in my

behalf had failed. My friends, indeed, Mrs. Rowallan, Mrs. Bethune, and my mother, who, with Mrs. Borthwick, had a few days before arrived from Galloway, were still sanguine, and continued to hope on, though, as their agitated looks and faltering voices testified, it was against hope. It was the evening of the twenty-first day after Mr. Innes had left Edinburgh; the deeptoned bell of St. Giles had tolled the hour of ten; the streets were deserted, dark, and silent; I had kindled my lamp, and, seated at a small oaken table, had finished reading a portion of the Scriptures. The place where I had been reading was in Isaiah, where Hezekiah receives this message from the prophet, "Set thine house in order, for thou shalt die, and not live." Leaning my face on my hands, I repeated the king's words of sorrow-"I too shall go to the gates of the grave; I am deprived of the residue of my years; I shall not see the Lord, even the Lord in the land of the living; I shall behold man no more with the inhabitants of the world." My thoughts naturally reverted to the past. Pictures of other days and other scenes rose up and floated before me, in the bright light of the soul. I thought of the martyrdom of Hugh MacKail, which took place the day on which I first entered Edinburgh, and the impressions which it made upon me-impressions which no succeeding scenes had effacedand that the vast crowd which I beheld with such awe, assembled to witness his execution, would ere long be seen assembling to witness my own. I thought of the dead; I thought also of the living the living whom I deeply loved, and from whom, by the dark decrees of the "wicked great in power," I was about to be severed, as to earth and time, for ever. It was a moment