the case. "My sword is the king's, and when he commands, I draw it in his service."
As for that other and better known Claverhouse, the determined foe of the Covenant, the unrelenting and merciless punisher of a disobedient peasantry, he, too, is best taken as he stands; shorn, indeed, of Wodrow's extravagant embellishments, but equally free from the delicate gloss of a too liberal absolution. He was a soldier acting under the stringent orders of an angry government, and he carried out the harsh measures entrusted to him with a stern and impartial severity. Those were turbulent times, and the wild western Whigs had given decisive proof on more than one occasion that they were ill disposed to figure as mere passive martyrs to their cause.
"For treason, d' ye see,
Was to them a dish of tea,
And murder, bread and butter."
They were stout fighters, too, taking as kindly to their carnal as to their spiritual weapons, and a warfare against them was as ingloriously dangerous as the melancholy skirmishes of our own army with the Indians, who, it would seem, were driven to the war-path by a some-
