deen pitifully, without regard to God or man;" and he goes on in his
specific way, describing the plundering until he reaches this climax:
"No foul--cock or hen--left unkilled. The haill house-dogs, messens, and
whelps within Aberdeen felled and slain upon the gate, so that neither
hound nor messen or other dog was left that they could see." But there
was a special reason for this. The ladies of Aberdeen, on the retiring
of Montrose's army, had decorated all the vagabond street-dogs with the
blue ribbon of the Covenant.

This was in 1639. Five years afterwards Montrose came back on them in
more terrible guise still, to punish the town for having yielded to the
Covenant. In Aberdeen, Cavalier principles generally predominated; but
after being overrun and plundered successively by either party, the
Covenanters, having the acting government of the country at their back,
succeeded in establishing a predominance in the councils of the
exhausted community. Spalding had no respect for the civic and rural
forces they attempted to embody, and speaks of a petty bailie "who
brought in ane drill-master to learn our poor bodies to handle their
arms, who had more need to handle the plough and win their livings."
Montrose had now with him his celebrated army of Highlanders--or Irish,
as Spalding calls them--who broke at a rush through the feeble force
sent out of the town to meet them. Montrose "follows the chase to
Aberdeen, his men hewing and cutting down all manner of men they could
overtake within the town, upon the streets, or in their houses, and
round about the town, as our men were fleeing, with broadswords, but
mercy or remeid. These cruel Irish, seeing a man well clad, would first
tyr [_i.e._, strip] him and save the clothes unspoiled, then kill the
man; ... nothing heard but pitiful howling, crying, weeping, mourning,
through all the streets.... It is lamentable to hear how thir Irishes,
who had gotten the spoil of the town, did abuse the samin. The men that
they killed they would not suffer to be buried, but tirled them of
their clothes, syne left their naked bodies lying above the ground. The
wife durst not cry nor weep at her husband's slaughter before her eyes,
nor the mother for her son--which if they were heard, then they were
presently slain also; ... and none durst bury the dead. Yea, and I saw
two corpses carried to the burial through the old town with women only,
and not are man amongst them, so that the naked corp