ted to the multitude as that of a traitor. "He knew," he said,
"that it was usual, and it did not affect him." During these singular
conversations, his spiritual attendant and the General, could hardly
have been more precise in their descriptions had they been portraying
the festive ceremonials of a coming bridal, than they were in the
fearful minutiae of the approaching execution. It was thought by them
that such recitals would accustom the mind of the prisoner to the
apparatus and formalities that would attend his death, and that these
would lose their influence over his mind. "He allowed with me," observes
Mr. Foster, "that such circumstances were not so melancholy as dying
after a lingering disorder, in a darkened room, with weeping friends
around one, and whilst the shattered frame sank under slow exhaustion."
But experience and human feelings contradict this observation of the
resigned and unhappy sufferer; we look to death, under such an aspect,
as the approach of rest; but human nature shrinks from the violent
struggle, the momentary but fierce convulsion, plunging us, as it were,
into the abyss of the grave.

At this moment of his existence, when it was certain ruin at Court and
in the army, to befriend the Jacobite prisoner, a friend, the friend of
his youth, came nobly forward to attend Lord Kilmarnock in his dying
moments. This was John Walkinshaw Craufurd, of Craufurdland in the
county of Ayr, between whose family and that of the House of Boyd, a
long and intimate friendship of several centuries had existed; "so much
so," observes a member of the present family of Craufurd,[386] "that a
subterranean passage is said to exist between our old castles, of which
we _fancy_ proofs; but these are fire-side legends."

"The family of Craufurd," observes Mr. Burke, "is one of antiquity and
eminence in a part of the empire where ancestry and exploit have ever
been held in enthusiastic admiration." By marriage, in the thirteenth
century, it is allied anciently with the existing house of Loudon; and
its connection and friendship with the House of Boyd was cemented by the
death of one of its heads, Robert Craufurd, in 1487, in consequence of a
wound received at the Wyllielee, from attending James Boyd, Earl of
Arran, in a duel with the Earl of Eglintoun. In the days of Charles the
First and Second, the Craufurds had been Covenanters, as appears in the
history of that time: and in the year 1745, they were stanch Whigs; an