seized his eldest son, Patrick, and cast him into prison.  Two days after Jerviswoode’s death, the lad petitioned the Privy Council for release.  He was but “a poor afflicted young boy,” he said, loyal to his principles and with a hatred of plots, and only craved liberty that he might “see to some livelihood for himself” and “be in some condition” to help and serve his disconsolate mother and the rest of his father’s ten starving children.  Most grudgingly was the boon bestowed, and not until the boy had obtained security for his good behaviour to the extent of two thousand pounds sterling was he allowed to return to the Merse.

Meantime Redbraes Castle was constantly kept under supervision.  Scarcely a week passed without a party of redcoats clattering up the drive, interrogating the servants, tramping through all the rooms, hunting round the policies, and doing everything in their power to make things unpleasant for the wife and children of this attainted rebel.  To only two people in the house, and to one out of it, was the secret of Sir Patrick Home’s hiding-place known.  With the help of a faithful friend and retainer, Jamie Winter, the carpenter, Lady Home and her daughter Grisell had one dark night carried bed and bedclothes to the burying-place of the Homes, a vault under Polwarth Church, a mile from Redbraes.  A black walnut folding-bed, exactly underneath the pulpit from which the minister of Polwarth preached every Sunday, was the fugitive’s resting-place at night, while for a month he saw no more daylight than was able to reach him from a slit at one end of the vault.  The ashes of his ancestors were scarcely lively company, but Sir Patrick found “great comfort and constant entertainment” by repeating to himself Buchanan’s Latin Version of the Psalms.  Each night, too, the prisoner was cheered by a visit from his daughter Grisell.  Through an open glen by the Swindon Burn, down what is called The Lady’s Walk, Grisell nightly came to the vault with her little store of provisions.  She was an imaginative, poetic little maid, and the whisper of the wind in the lime trees that grew on either hand would make her shiver, and yet more loudly would her heart thump when in the darkness she stumbled over the graves in the kirkyard, and remembered all the tales she had ever heard of bogles and of ghosts.  That lonely walk in the night must always have been full of terrors, yet Grisell’s love for her father was so great that she steadfastly braved them all.  One fear only she had—­that of the soldiers.  The wind moaning through the trees or rustling the long grass, the sound of a rabbit or some other wild thing in the bracken, the sudden bark of a dog,—­all these made her sure that some spy had found out her secret, and sent her running as fast as her little legs could carry her to try to save her father from his captors.  The first night she went was the worst, for the minister kept dogs, and the manse was near the church, and even her light footfall was sufficient to set every one