amang the moors--and who now
knew that his wife and daughter were bound to stakes deep down in the
waters o' the very bay that his eyes beheld rolling, and his ears heard
roaring--all the while that there was a God in heaven! Naebody could
speak to him--although they all beseeched their Maker to have
compassion upon him, and not to let his heart break and his reason fail.
'The stakes! the stakes! O Jesus! point out to me, with thy own scarred
hand, the place where my wife and daughter are bound to the stakes--and
I may yet bear them up out of the sand, and bring the bodies ashore--to
be restored to life! O brethren, brethren!--said ye that my Christian
and my Hannah have been for an hour below the sea? And was it from fear
of fifty armed men, that so many thousand fathers and mothers, and sons
and daughters, and brothers and sisters, rescued them not from such
cruel, cruel death?' After uttering mony mair siclike raving words, he
suddenly plunged into the sea, and, being a strong swimmer, was soon far
out into the bay--and led by some desperate instinct to the very place
where the stakes were fixed in the sand. Perfectly resigned had the
martyrs been to their doom--but in the agonies o' that horrible death,
there had been some struggles o' the mortal body, and the weight o' the
waters had borne down the stakes, so that, just as if they had been
lashed to a spar to enable them to escape from shipwreck, baith the
bodies came floatin' to the surface, and his hand grasped, without
knowing it, his ain Hannah's gowden hair--sairly defiled, ye may weel
think, wi' the sand--baith their faces changed frae what they ance were
by the wrench o' death. Father, mother, and daughter came a'thegither to
the shore--and there was a cry went far and wide, up even to the
hiding-places o' the faithfu' among the hags and cleuchs i' the moors,
that the sea had given up the living, and that the martyrs were
triumphant, even in this world, over the powers o' Sin and o' Death.
Yea, they were indeed triumphant;--and well might the faithfu' sing
aloud in the desert, 'O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy
victory?' for these three bodies were but as the weeds on which they lay
stretched out to the pitying gaze of the multitude, but their spirits
had gane to heaven to receive the eternal rewards o' sanctity and
truth."

Not a house in all the parish--scarcely excepting Mount Pleasant
itself--all round and about which our heart could in