Frequently the rebels made a halt near some roadside alehouse, or in some convenient park, where Colonel Wallace, who had now taken the command, would review the horse and foot, during which time Turner was sent either into the alehouse or round the shoulder of the hill, to prevent him from seeing the disorders which were likely to arise.  He was, at last, on the 25th day of the month, between Douglas and Lanark, permitted to behold their evolutions.  ’I found their horse did consist of four hundreth and fortie, and the foot of five hundreth and upwards. . . .  The horsemen were armed for most part with suord and pistoll, some onlie with suord.  The foot with musket, pike, sith (scythe), forke, and suord; and some with suords great and long.’  He admired much the proficiency of their cavalry, and marvelled how they had attained to it in so short a time. {4f}

At Douglas, which they had just left on the morning of this great wapinshaw, they were charged—­awful picture of depravity!—­with the theft of a silver spoon and a nightgown.  Could it be expected that while the whole country swarmed with robbers of every description, such a rare opportunity for plunder should be lost by rogues—­that among a thousand men, even though fighting for religion, there should not be one Achan in the camp?  At Lanark a declaration was drawn up and signed by the chief rebels.  In it occurs the following: 

’The just sense whereof ’—­the sufferings of the country—­’made us choose, rather to betake ourselves to the fields for self-defence, than to stay at home, burdened daily with the calamities of others, and tortured with the fears of our own approaching misery.’ {4g}

The whole body, too, swore the Covenant, to which ceremony the epitaph at the head of this chapter seems to refer.

A report that Dalzell was approaching drove them from Lanark to Bathgate, where, on the evening of Monday the 26th, the wearied army stopped.  But at twelve o’clock the cry, which served them for a trumpet, of ‘Horse! horse!’ and ‘Mount the prisoner!’ resounded through the night-shrouded town, and called the peasants from their well-earned rest to toil onwards in their march.  The wind howled fiercely over the moorland; a close, thick, wetting rain descended.  Chilled to the bone, worn out with long fatigue, sinking to the knees in mire, onward they marched to destruction.  One by one the weary peasants fell off from their ranks to sleep, and die in the rain-soaked moor, or to seek some house by the wayside wherein to hide till daybreak.  One by one at first, then in gradually increasing numbers, at every shelter that was seen, whole troops left the waning squadrons, and rushed to hide themselves from the ferocity of the tempest.  To right and left nought could be descried but the broad expanse of the moor, and the figures of their fellow-rebels, seen dimly through the murky night, plodding onwards through the sinking moss.  Those who kept together—­a miserable few—­often halted to rest themselves, and to allow their lagging comrades to overtake them.  Then onward they went again, still hoping for assistance, reinforcement, and supplies; onward again, through the wind, and the rain, and the darkness—­onward to their defeat at Pentland, and their scaffold at Edinburgh.  It was calculated that they lost one half of their army on that disastrous night-march.