covenanters gave to those who entered the town grim warning of the risks of nonconformity.  Doubtless little Grisell had been provided by her parents with a suitable escort, but, even so, her heart must have beat faster as she went up the High Street to where the “Heart of Midlothian” then stood, and asked to see Mr. Robert Baillie, her father’s friend.  The bright-eyed, slim little maid, with her chestnut hair and exquisite complexion, must have been as unexpected a sight in that gloomy place as a wild rose in a desert.  None could suspect her of meddling with affairs of State, or of tampering with the prisoners of his gracious Majesty.  Thus Grisell Home was able successfully to carry a letter of advice and information, and to bring back to her father in the Merse tidings of a blameless martyr.

With his father in prison that day was Baillie’s son, George, a boy one year older than Grisell.  He had been, as were many of the well-born lads of his time, at his studies in Holland, reading law, when his father was put in prison, but hastened home on hearing the news.  Boys wore swords, and not Eton jackets, in George Baillie’s day.  He had, as his daughter afterwards wrote of him, “a rough, manly countenance”; and from that day until the day of her death that face, which she knew first as a boy’s, was more beautiful to Grisell Home than any other face on earth.  Several times afterwards was Grisell sent as bearer of important letters from her father to him whose son, in days still long to come, was to be her husband, and never once was the douce little messenger suspected.

Not many months later her own father was a prisoner in Dumbarton Castle, and during the fifteen months in which he lay there, Grisell was still the messenger, not only to him, but to his friends in various parts.  Her early childhood may have been unharassed, but Grisell Home’s girlhood was a careful and anxious one.  On the discovery of the Rye House Plot, Baillie of Jerviswoode and Home of Polwarth, innocent men both, were denounced as traitors to their King.  Baillie was taken, and after several months of imprisonment in London, so heavily loaded with chains that his health completely broke down, he was brought by sea to Edinburgh in stormy November weather which kept the ship a fortnight on its way.  A dying man when he was put in the Tolbooth, he yet had to undergo many exhausting examinations and a farcical trial, with “Bluidy Mackenzie” for chief inquisitor, and on Christmas Eve, 1684, he gallantly and cheerfully met a martyr’s death at the Market Cross of Edinburgh.

Sir Patrick Home’s denunciation was longer in coming than that of his friend, and not until November 1684 was the warrant for his apprehension issued.  He, good man, had no desire for martyrdom; moreover, at that time he already possessed ten children, whose future as orphans was likely to be wretched, and so Sir Patrick sought concealment from the hounds of the law.  Foiled in laying hold of him, the law