''
We had our share in other national misfortunes
---were forfeited, like Sir John Colville of the Dale,
for following our betters to the field of Langside;
and, in the contentious times of the last Stewarts,
we were severely fined for harbouring and resetting
intercommuned ministers; and narrowly escaped
giving a martyr to the Calendar of the Covenant,
in the person of the father of our family historian.
He ``took the sheaf from the mare,'' however,
as the MS. expresses it, and agreed to accept
of the terms of pardon offered by government, and
sign the bond, in evidence he would give no farther
ground of offence. My grandsire glosses over his
father's backsliding as smoothly as he can, and comforts
himself with ascribing his want of resolution
to his unwillingness to wreck the ancient name and
family, and to permit his lands and lineage to fall
under a doom of forfeiture.
``And indeed,'' said the venerable compiler, ``as,
praised be God, we seldom meet in Scotland with
these belly-gods and voluptuaries, whilk are unnatural
enough to devour their patrimony bequeathed
to them by their forbears in chambering and wantonness,
so that they come, with the prodigal son,
to the husks and the swine-trough; and as I have
the less to dreid the existence of such unnatural
Neroes in mine own family to devour the substance
of their own house like brute beasts out of mere
gluttonie and Epicurishnesse, so I need only warn
mine descendants against over hastily meddling
with the mutations in state and in religion, which
have been near-hand to the bringing this poor
house of Croftangry to perdition, as we have shown
more than once.
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