night--and battles between the smugglers and the king's men, both by
sea and land. There was a continual drunkenness and debauchery; and
our session, that was but on the lip of this whirlpool of iniquity,
had an awful time o't. I did all that was in the power of nature to
keep my people from the contagion: I preached sixteen times from
the text, "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's." I
visited, and I exhorted; I warned, and I prophesied; I told them
that, although the money came in like sclate stones, it would go
like the snow off the dyke. But for all I could do, the evil got in
among us, and we had no less than three contested bastard bairns
upon our hands at one time, which was a thing never heard of in a
parish of the shire of Ayr since the Reformation. Two of the
bairns, after no small sifting and searching, we got fathered at
last; but the third, that was by Meg Glaiks, and given to one Rab
Rickerton, was utterly refused, though the fact was not denied; but
he was a termagant fellow, and snappit his fingers at the elders.
The next day he listed in the Scotch Greys, who were then quartered
at Ayr, and we never heard more of him, but thought he had been
slain in battle, till one of the parish, about three years since,
went up to London to lift a legacy from a cousin that died among the
Hindoos. When he was walking about, seeing the curiosities, and
among others Chelsea Hospital, he happened to speak to some of the
invalids, who found out from his tongue that he was a Scotchman; and
speaking to the invalids, one of them, a very old man, with a grey
head and a leg of timber, inquired what part of Scotland he was come
from; and when he mentioned my parish, the invalid gave a great
shout, and said he was from the same place himself; and who should
this old man be, but the very identical Rab Rickerton, that was art
and part in Meg Glaiks' disowned bairn. Then they had a long
converse together, and he had come through many hardships, but had