nsult about his funeral) that so he might not be put to
trouble for concealing him. It was quickly spread abroad that an
intercommuned preacher was dead in town, upon which the magistrates
ordered a messenger to go and arrest the corpse. They lay there that
night, and the next day a considerable number of his friends in Fife, in
good order, came to town in order to his burial, but the magistrates
would not suffer him to be interred at Perth, but ordered the town
militia to be raised, and imprisoned John Bryce, box-master or treasurer
to the guildry, for returning to give out the militia's arms. However
the magistrates gave his friends leave to carry his corpse out of town,
and bury them without their precincts, where they pleased. But any of
the town's people, who were observed to accompany the funeral were
imprisoned. After they were gone out of town, his friends sent two men
before them to Drone, four miles from Perth, to prepare a grave in that
church-yard. The men went to Mr. Pitcairn, the minister there (one of
the old resolutioners), and desired the keys of the church-yard that
they might dig a grave for the corpse of Mr. Welwood, but he refused to
give them. They went over the church-yard-dyke and digged a grave, and
there the corpse was interred.

There appears to be only one of his sermons in print (said to be
preached in Bogles-hole in Clydesdale), upon 1 Peter iv. 18. _And if the
righteous scarcely be saved_, &c.--

There are also some of his religious letters, written to his godly
friends and acquaintances, yet extant in manuscript. But we are not to
expect to meet with any thing considerable of the writings of Mr. John
Welwood[162], or the succeeding worthies; and no wonder, seeing that in
such a broken state of the church, they were still upon their watch,
haunted and hurried from place to place, without the least time or
conveniency for writing; yea, and oftentimes what little fragments they
had collected, fell into the hand of false friends and enemies, and were
by them either destroyed or lost.

_The Life of WILLIAM GORDON of Earlstoun._

William Gordon of Earlstoun was born about the year----. He was son to
that famous reformer Alexander Gordon of Earlstoun, and was lineally
descended of that famous Alexander Gordon who entertained the followers
of John Wickliffe, and who had a new testament of the vulgar tongue
which they used to read in their meetings at the wood near Airds beside
Earlsto