fathers had made a
good end for the faith, so that we were presently considered wholly free
of the meeting.

We heard that there was to be a field conventicle near by, at which Mr.
Cameron was to preach. This was the reason of so great a gathering, many
having come out of Ayrshire, and even as far as Lesmahagow in the Upper
Ward of Lanark, where there are many very zealous for the truth.

Then they fell again to the talking, while I noted how the maids
comported themselves. The eldest of them and the tallest, was a lass of
mettle, with dark, bent brows. She held her head high, and seemed, by
her attiring and dignity, accustomed to other places than this moorland
farm-town. Yet here she was, handing victual like a servitor, before a
field-preaching. And this I was soon to learn was a common thing in
Galloway, where nearly the whole of the gentry, and still more of their
wives and daughters, were on the side of the Covenant. It was no
uncommon thing for a King's man, when he was disturbing a
conventicle--"skailing a bees' byke" as it was called--to come on his
own wife's or, it might be, his daughter's palfrey, tethered in waiting
to the root of some birk-tree.

"Keep your black-tail coats closer in by!" said Duke Rothes once to his
lady, who notoriously harboured outed preachers, "or I shall have to do
some of them a hurt! Ca' your messans to your foot, else I'll hae to
kennel them for ye!"

There was however no such safe hiding as in some of the great houses of
the strict persecutors.

So in a little while, the most part of the company going out, this tall,
dark-browed maid was made known to us by Matthew of the Dub, as Mistress
Kate McGhie, daughter of the Laird of Balmaghie, within which parish we
were.

Then Maisie Lennox beckoned to the third maid, and she came forward with
shyness and grace. She was younger than the other two, and seemed to be
a well-grown lass of thirteen or fourteen.

"This," said Maisie Lennox, "is my cousin Margaret of Glen Vernock."

The maid whom she so named blushed, and spoke to us in the broader
accent of the Shire, yet pleasantly and frankly as one well reared.

Presently there came to us the taller maid--she who was called Kate, the
Laird's daughter.

She held out her hand to me.

"Ah, Will of Earlstoun, I have heard of you!"

I answered that I hoped it was for good.

"It was from Maisie there that I heard it," she said, which indeed told
me nothing. But Kate McGhie shoo