h we had been eye-witnesses.

CHAPTER XLIV.

A DESIRABLE GENERAL MEETING.

The next morning dawned colder and more chilly. The catch of the autumn
of the year was in the air, and it nipped shrewdly till the sun looked
over the hills in the east. This was to be the great day of the
Societies' general meeting, which had been summoned in the wilds of
Shalloch-on-Minnoch.[10]

[Footnote 10: Now, because men so readily forget, I may repeat how that
the United Societies had grown in strength since Ayrsmoss, and now
needed only a head to make a stand for the cause. It was a strange way
of the Providence of God, that it should come about that these little
meetings for prayer in remote places of the land, should grow to be so
mighty a power for the pulling down of strongholds. At this time, though
every appearance in arms had been put down at Pentland, at Bothwell, and
at Ayrsmoss, yet the Blue Banner itself had never been put down. And
even now many a Malignant in the south and west trembled at the great
and terrible name of the "Seven Thousand."

The proclamations of the Societies, which were affixed to every kirk
door and market cross in the south, caused many a persecutor and
evil-wisher to quake and be silent. And the word that God was building
for Himself a folk on the hills of Scotland reached even to the Low
Countries, and kept the Prince of Orange and his counsellors watching
with eager eyes those things which were done by the Remnant over seas,
till the appointed hour should come. Heading and hanging would not last
for ever, and such is the binding power of persecution that for each one
cut off by prison, or the hangman's cord, ten were sworn in to do the
will of the Societies. Till this present time most fatal dissension and
division among themselves had been their undoing. But there was one
coming, now a willow wand of a student of Groningen in Holland, who
should teach the Societies to be a wall of fire about their faith and
their land.

To their conventions came commissioners from all parts of Scotland, but
mainly from the southern and western shires, as well as from the Merse,
and out of the bounds of Fife.]

Though the morn had dawned caller, with a white rime of frost lying on
the grass and for a little space making grey the leaves of the trees,
the day of the great conventicle was one of great and lowering heat. My
mother was set to go--and Kate McGhie also. Wat must needs therefore
accompany t