John Brown, the Ayr, or as he was more commonly designated by the neighbours, the Religious, Carrier, had been absent, during the month of January (1685), from his home in the neighbourhood of Muirkirk, for several days. The weather, in the meantime, had become extremely stormy, and a very considerable fall of snow had taken place. His only daughter, a girl of about eleven years of age, had frequently, during the afternoon of Saturday, looked out from the cottage door into the drift, in order to report to her mother, who was occupied with the nursing of an infant brother, the anxious occurrences of the evening. “Help,” too, the domestic cur, had not remained an uninterested spectator of the general anxiety, but by several fruitless and silent excursions into the night, had given indisputable testimony that the object of his search had not yet neared the solitary shieling. It was a long, and a wild road, lying over an almost trackless muir, along which John Brown had to come; and the cart track, which even in better weather, and with the advantage of more daylight, might easily be mistaken, had undoubtedly, ere this, become invisible. Besides, John had long been a marked bird, having rendered himself obnoxious to the “powers that were,” by his adherence to the Sanquhar declaration, his attending field-preachings, or as they were termed “conventicles,” his harbouring of persecuted ministers, and, above all, by a moral, a sober, and a proverbially devout and religious conduct.
In an age when immorality was held to be synonymous with loyalty, and irreligion with non-resistance and passive obedience, it was exceedingly dangerous to wear such a character, and, accordingly, there had not been wanting information to the prejudice of this quiet and godly man. Clavers, who, ever since the affair of Drumclog, had discovered more of the merciless and revengeful despot than of the veteran or hero, had marked his name, according to report, in his black list; and when once Clavers had taken his resolution and his measures, the Lord have mercy upon those against whom these were pointed! He seldom hesitated in carrying his plans into effect, although his path lay over the trampled and lacerated feelings of humanity. Omens, too, of an unfriendly and evil-boding import, had not been wanting in the cottage of John to increase the alarm. The cat had mewed suspiciously, had appeared restless, and had continued to glare in hideous indication from beneath the kitchen bed. The death-watch, which had not been noticed since the decease of the gudeman’s mother, was again, in the breathless pause of listening suspense, heard to chick distinctly; and the cock, instead of crowing, as on ordinary occasions, immediately before day-dawn, had originated a sudden and alarming flap of his wings, succeeded by a fearful scream, long before the usual bedtime.
It was a gloomy crisis; and after a considerable time spent in dark and despairing reflection, the evening lamp was at last trimmed, and the peat fire repaired into something approaching to a cheerful flame. But all would not do; for whilst the soul within is disquieted and in suspense, all external means and appliances are inadequate to procure comfort, or impart even an air of cheerfulness. At last Help suddenly lifted his head from the hearth, shook his ears, sprung to his feet, and with something betwixt a growl and a bark, rushed towards the door, at which the yird drift was now entering copiously. It was, however, a false alarm. The cow had moved beyond the “hallan,” or the mice had come into sudden contact, and squeaked behind the rafters. John, too, it was reasoned betwixt mother and daughter, was always so regular and pointed in his arrivals, and this being Saturday night, it was not a little or an insignificant obstruction that could have prevented him from being home, in due time, at least, for family worship. His cart, in fact, had usually been pitched up, with the trams supported against the peat-stack, by two o’clock in the afternoon; and the evening of his arrival from his weekly excursion to Ayr was always an occasion of affectionate intercourse, and more than ordinary interest. Whilst his disconsolate wife, therefore, turned her eyes towards her husband’s chair, and to the family Bible, which lay in a “bole” within reach of his hand, and at the same time listened to the howling and intermitting gusts of the storm, she could not avoid—it was not in nature that she should—contrasting her present with her former situation; thus imparting even to objects of the most kindly and comforting association, all the livid and darkening hues of her disconsolate mind. But there is a depth and a reach in true and genuine piety, which the plummet of sorrow may never measure. True religion sinks into the heart as the refreshing dew does into the chinks and the crevices of the dry and parched soil; and the very fissures of affliction, the cleavings of the soul, present a more ready and inviting, as well as efficient access, to the softening influence of piety.
This poor woman began gradually to think less of danger, and more of God—to consider as a set-off against all her fruitless uneasiness, the vigilance and benevolence of that powerful Being, to whom, and to whose will, the elements, in all their combinations and relations, are subservient; and having quieted her younger child in the cradle, and intimated her intention by a signal to her daughter, she proceeded to take down the family Bible, and to read out in a soft, and subdued, but most devout and impressive voice, the following lines:—
I waited for the Lord my God,
And patiently did bear;
At length to me he did incline
My voice and cry to hear.
These two solitary worshippers of Him whose eyes are on the just, and whose ear is open to their cry, had proceeded to the beginning of the fourth verse of this psalm, and were actually employed in singing with an increased and increasing degree of fervour and devotion, the following trustful and consolatory expressions—
O blessed is the man whose trust