est years of life as a slave in
Morocco. It had its volumes of sound theology, too, and of stiff
controversy,--Flavel's Works, and Henry's Commentary, and Hutchinson on
the Lesser Prophets, and a very old treatise on the Revelation, with the
title-page away, and blind Jameson's volume on the Hierarchy, with first
editions of Naphthali, the Cloud of Witnesses, and the Hind let Loose.
But with these solid authors I did not venture to grapple until long
after this time. Of the works of fact and incident which it contained,
those of the voyagers were my especial favourites. I perused with
avidity the voyages of Anson, Drake, Raleigh, Dampier, and Captain Woods
Rogers; and my mind became so filled with conceptions of what was to be
seen and done in foreign parts, that I wished myself big enough to be a
sailor, that I might go and see coral islands and burning mountains, and
hunt wild beasts and fight battles. I have already made mention of my
two maternal uncles; and referred, at least incidentally, to their
mother, as the friend and relative of my fathers aged cousin, and, like
her, a great-grand-child of the last curate of Nigg. The curate's
youngest daughter had been courted and married by a somewhat wild young
farmer, of the clan Ross, but who was known, like the celebrated
Highland outlaw, from the colour of his hair, as Roy, or the Red. Donald
Roy was the best club-player in the district; and as King James's "Book
of Sports" was not deemed a very bad one in the semi-Celtic parish of
Nigg, the games in which Donald took part were usually played on the
Sabbath. About the time of the Revolution, however, he was laid hold of
by strong religious convictions, heralded, say the traditions of the
district, by events that approximated in character to the supernatural;
and Donald became the subject of a mighty change. There is a phase of
the religious character, which in the south of Scotland belongs to the
first two ages of Presbytery, but which disappeared ere its third
establishment under William of Nassau, that we find strikingly
exemplified in the Welches, Pedens, and Cargills of the times of the
persecution, and in which a sort of wild machinery of the supernatural
was added to the commoner aspects of a living Christianity. The men in
whom it was exhibited were seers of visions and dreamers of dreams; and,
standing on the very verge of the natural world, they looked far into
the world of spirits, and had at times their stran