, a doubtful and disunited body. The most active of
their number were those concerned with Burley in the death of the Primate, four
or five of whom had found their way to Loudon Hill, together with other men of
the same relentless and uncompromising zeal, who had in various ways given
desperate and unpardonable offence to the Government.
    With them were mingled their preachers, men who had spurned at the
indulgence offered by Government, and preferred assembling their flocks in the
wilderness, to worshipping in temples built by human hands, if their doing the
latter should be construed to admit any right on the part of their rulers to
interfere with the supremacy of the Kirk. The other class of councillors were
such gentlemen of small fortune, and substantial farmers, as a sense of
intolerable oppression had induced to take arms and join the insurgents. These
also had their clergymen with them; and such divines, having many of them taken
advantage of the indulgence, were prepared to resist the measures of their more
violent brethren, who proposed a declaration in which they should give testimony
against the warrants and instructions for indulgence as sinful and unlawful
acts. This delicate question had been passed over in silence in the first
draught of the manifestoes which they intended to publish of the reasons of
their gathering in arms; but it had been stirred anew during Balfour's absence,
and, to his great vexation, he now found that both parties had opened upon it in
full cry, - Macbriar, Kettledrummle, and other teachers of the wanderers, being
at the very spring-tide of polemical discussion with Peter Poundtext, the
indulged pastor of Milnwood's parish, who, it seems, had e'en girded himself
with a broadsword, but, e'er he was called upon to fight for the good cause of
Presbytery in the field, was manfully defending his own dogmata in the council.
It was the din of this conflict, maintained chiefly between Poundtext and
Kettledrummle, together with the clamour of their adherents, which had saluted
Morton's ears upon approaching the cottage. Indeed, as both the divines were men
well gifted with words and lungs, and each fierce, ardent, and intolerant in
defence of his own doctrine, prompt in the recollection of texts wherewith they
battered each other without mercy, and deeply impressed with the importance of
the subject of discussion, the noise of the debate betwixt them fell little
short of that which might have attended an actual bodily conflict.
    Burley, scandalised at the disunion implied in this virulent strife of
tongues, interposed between the disputants, and, by some general remarks on the
unseasonableness