mediately, not suffering them to enter into any house at their coming,
nor at the entreaty of the poor men would suffer one to lend them a
Bible, who it seems offered it, nor allow them a moment to pray to God."
Defoe's "Memoirs of the Church of Scotland" were first published in
1717, a few years before Wodrow's History. Elsewhere in the same work he
states that Claverhouse had "among the rest of his cruelties barbarously
murdered several of the persecuted people with his own hands," also that
"this man is said to have killed above a hundred men in this kind of
cold blood cruelty." But Defoe's qualifications for a historian of those
times are, to say the least, uncertain. He mentions Cameron and Cargill
as alive and busy in 1684, four years after one had died fighting at
Aird's Moss, and the other on the scaffold at Edinburgh.

[63] Wodrow, iv. 197; Napier, i. 89. I have called this the most
authentic version because it professes to have come from the murderers
themselves. It is to be found in a letter to Wodrow (printed by Napier)
now in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh. The date is 1715, and the
writer, who only signs his initials, J.C., calls Wodrow "cousin." "I
give you the account," he writes, "from the best information it's
possible to be got, viz., from Robert Dun, in Woodheade of Carsphairn,
and John Clark, then in that parish, now in Glenmont, in the parish of
Strathone, anent the curate's death of Carsphairn, which they had from
the actors' own mouths." Wodrow adds a little touch of his own--"Mr.
Peirson with fury came out upon them with arms"--and is silent on the
fact of Mitchell's presence.

[64] Fountainhall's "Historical Notices," and a letter to Queensberry
from Sir Robert Dalzell and others, quoted by Napier, ii. 427-8.

[65] Wodrow, iv. 184.

[66] For example, the story told of Claverhouse sparing a man's life for
the sport his capture had afforded, but ordering his ears to be shorn
off. This may be found in a book called "Gleanings among the Mountains,
or Traditions of the Covenanters," published at Edinburgh, in 1846, by
the Rev. Robert Simpson, of Sanquhar. The same gentleman is responsible
for an earlier volume, "The Times of Claverhouse," in which the
Covenanters are described as a class of "quiet and orderly men,"
maintaining the standard of their gospel in "the most peaceful and
inoffensive way." In neither volume is any authority offered for these
stories: even the evidence of time and pl