Another of Defoe’s victims is Matthew Mekellwrath.  Claverhouse, he says, riding through Camonel in Carrick, saw a man run across the street in front of the soldiers, as though to get out of their way, and instantly ordered him to be shot, without any examination.  In the “Cloud of Witnesses” an epitaph is quoted to show that the man was shot for refusing the abjuration oath.

Next we find four men dragged out of a house at Auchencloy, on Dee-side, where they had met for prayer, and shot before the door, without any examination.  Defoe gives the names of the four as John Grier, Robert Fergusson, Archibald Stuart, and Robert Stuart.  Shields substitutes for Archibald Stuart the name of James Macmichael.  In “The Cloud of Witnesses” only Grier, Robert Stuart, and Fergusson are named.  In Wodrow’s pages the four men become eight:  of these four, as given by Shields (Macmichael, however, being spelt Macmichan), were shot at once:  two more, Smith and Hunter, were carried to Kirkcudbright and hanged after a form of trial:  two, unnamed, got safe away.  “It may be,” adds Wodrow, “the rescue of some prisoners at Kirkcudbright by some of the wanderers, a little before this, was the pretext for all this cruelty.”

It may indeed have been so, and something more than a rescue of prisoners may have helped.  The affair on Dee-side took place December 18th, 1684.  On the 11th of the same month (just after Renwick’s proclamation of war) a party of men, headed by James Macmichael, murdered Peter Peirson, minister of Carsphairn, at his own door.  Wodrow cannot shirk this fact:  he finds it detestable, and generally denounced and disowned by the more respectable of the Covenanters; but he also manages to find as many excuses for it as he conveniently can in the provocation given by the victim.  Peirson, he says, was “a surly, ill-natured man, and horridly severe.”  He was of great service to Lagg in ferreting out rebels, used to sit in court with him to advise him of the prisoners’ characters, and generally make himself obnoxious to the Covenanters.  He was also accused of leaning to popery, and is said on one occasion to have openly defended the doctrine of purgatory; on another he maintained Papists to be much better subjects than Presbyterians—­as, indeed, from the Government’s point of view they certainly were.  How far Peirson deserved this character we cannot surely tell.  The fact of his being hated by the Covenanters is not necessarily to his discredit; but we may assume that he was not conciliatory in his speech, that he meddled more in civil matters than became his cloth, and, in short, was probably made much after the same pattern as some of the chosen vessels of the Covenanting tabernacle.  He lived alone in his manse, without even a servant, but took care always to have his firearms handy.  The accounts of the murder vary a little in detail.  One says that he was killed in a scuffle arising out of his furious and unprovoked treatment of a deputation which