Papistrie thairin." "Item (says this record of about 1570) in chapell, 2 mess buiks. Item, ane ymage of the babe Jesus. Item, kaist ymage of our Lady, and ane grit ymage witht ane ymage of Sanct Ann. Item, ane little ymage of ewir bane that stud upone ane chandlar," &c.

Thankful, however, for even the comparatively recent records of his office, and glad to know that under his care they were lately arranged with a view to reference as well as preservation, it is a more pleasant part of our task to indicate Mr. Hector's own plan of arranging his materials, and to describe how successfully he touched upon the various topics embraced in the volume issued in such excellent taste from the Paisley press. Section first is taken up with documents illustrating that period generally described in Scotland as "The Persecution;" sections two and three relate to the manners and customs of the people from about the time of the Revolution to the end of last century; section four recalls to readers the administration of law during the same years, and shows by many well-selected cases how severely it bore upon all charged with crime-young and old, woman or child-and what gross irregularity then characterised the administration of justice in provincial courts. The closing portion of Mr. Hector's very interesting volume is made partly up of a few miscellaneous papers relating to some Renfrewshire families of note, and a valuable, though rather dry series concerning rents and prices prevailing over the county during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Each legal document produced from the archives of the Sheriff-Clerk is accompanied by a page or two of explanatory matter, setting forth its main features and obviating any necessity for non-professional readers losing time or patience over the somewhat crabbed originals. In order, however, that these may be consulted by the careful scholar with as much exactness as possible, a few excellent drawings in facsimile have been introduced into the work. As was befitting the official chief in an office where Motherwell wrote, Mr. Hector has been fortunate enough to disinter a new Jacobite song out of a very unpromising bundle of law papers; but whatever zeal the author may have intended to show on behalf

of the exiled house, the merits of the piece are so very ordinary that James
M'Alpie, Sheriff-Clerk, and for some time Substitute, can hardly be said to add
to the interest of that department of literature which includes such lyrics as
"Will ye no come back again?" and "Waes me for Prince Charlie." The
inconvenience and loss occasioned by "Black" or counterfeit Irish coins is
touched upon in the form of a complaint at the instance of the Procurator-
Fiscal, of date 1727. The grievance unfortunately was too common in those
days, and neither swift nor severe punishment could prevent fraud in the currency.
In June of the following year (1728), Patrick, second Viscount Garnock (of
whom something may be learned in Dobie's "Examination of the Claims of
John Lindsay Craufurd") writes to Hunter of Hunterston from Kilbirnie:-
"Please lett me know, in answer to yrs. what i ou you o borrowed money,
which I think is a shilling sterline, and two or thereby halfpence." While

the general ignorance of the people and the uniform severity of those who sat
in high places are brought fully enough out in Mr. Hector's book, there is a
deficiency we did not expect in documents illustrating the darker superstitions
of the district-a matter to be wondered at all the more from the somewhat
evil eminence enjoyed by Renfrewshire in the annals of witches and warlocks.
Recent, historically speaking, though most of the documents are, some of them
almost touch the time when clergy and judges sent poor creatures to the gallows
or the stake for imputed crimes not possible to be committed. Some of the
victims, indeed, got a taste of the bitterness of death in both forms, being
first partly "wirrit to death" at a stake and then burnt. This sad chapter in
the history of ignorance and superstition is just touched upon in the case of
Perhie and others libelled in 1692 for the "unnatural, barbarous, and unchristian"
crime of drinking the health of the devil, and scandalising in connection there-
with certain good citizens of Paisley. The punishment in this case was simply
exposure at the Cross.
There is nothing about Mary Lamond and the other
Innerkip witches of 1662, who had been taught by Katherine Scott in Murdistane
to get milk from her neighbour's cow, "bidding hir goe out in mistie mornings,

and tak with her a hairie tedder, and draw it over the mouth of a mug, saying, in God's name send us milk and meikle of it. Be these wayes she and the said Kathrine got muckle of thair neibours' milk, and made butter and cheise thairof." Her experience, first at Ardgowan and then at Kempock, was that "The Deil, for ordinar in the shape of a black man with cloven feet, sang to them, gave them wyne to drink, and wheat bread to eat. When thay dancit they war all verie merrie, and he kist them, ane and all, when thay skaillit," except once when his sooty highness nipt her on the right side, "but thairafter straikit it with his hand and healed it.” There is nothing even about "Auld Dunrod," another graceless son of Innerkip, who

-muntit his stick,

His brumestick muntit he,

And he flychter't twa three times about,
Syne o'er the Firth did flee.

But he forgot the rowantree

At the Rest-and-be-Thanfu' stane,
His magic brumestick tint its spell,

And he daudit his head thereon.

It is possible that any official documents ever called into existence by such cases may still exist in the record room of the Lower Ward, or, what is more to be dreaded, they may have been withdrawn from the custody of officials not so careful as Sheriff-Clerks nowadays to permit private friends to illustrate narratives like the famous Bargarran imposture.

What mercy might be expected in those dark days by the victims of a wicked superstition may be illustrated from what happened so late as 1770 to Jean Montgomery, a married woman, who, on a charge by no means established in evidence, of stealing a cut of a piece of lawn of less value than ten shillings, suffered four months' imprisonment before trial, one month after trial, and, in addition to being banished from the country, was sentenced, under form of law and justice, to be stripped naked to the middle, marched

through the streets of Paisley in charge of the common hangman, and to be by him publicly whipped on the bare back at four places, all duly yet inhumanly set forth in the deliverance-ten lashes at the Townhead, ten at the head of the New Street, ten at the foot of the New Street, and a final ten lashes at the Cross, after being marched down the Causeyside and up Saint Mirren's Wynd, with her hands tied, as they had been all through her dismal progress. This terrible sentence, it is to be recollected, stands recorded not as witnessing against a distant age or a savage race-not in Dahomey or among black people at all—but at home, in a community reputed to be civilised, and near enough our own time to have been witnessed by the fathers of the present generation. From the fact of Jean Montgomery being described as a married woman, wife of John Storie, weaver, there is a presumption that she must at some time of her life have received in a kind of way the benefit of clergy, yet no voice is raised for mercy on her behalf in pulpit or on platform. Even the members for the county and burgh of Renfrew sit dumb in parliament, and this at a time when the one was represented by a gentleman so well known as Wm. M'Dowall of Castlesemple, and the other (embraced in the Glasgow group) by an official of such eminence as Lord Frederick Campbell, third son of John, fourth Duke of Argyll, afterwards a most efficient Lord Clerk-Register, and much talked of even earlier, from his marriage with the widow of that Laurence Earl Ferrers, executed at Tyburn for the murder of his land-steward. Had such a sentence stood on record against either man or woman in the time of the Persecution— say for "rabbling" some poor indulged curate or the like-there is no end to the illustrations it would have furnished the Kirk with of the patience manifested by the Covenanted opponents of a system only possible to be upheld by "the Boot" of Lauderdale and the sword of Dundee. Even in Boston at the time, where the struggle for independence was just assuming precise form, a mere black slave, George by name, for half-murdering a white man in his own house, and then tarring and feathering him, received only two years' imprisonment with the addition of forty stripes save one of the number meted out to poor Jean

Montgomery for her alleged guilt in stealing a cut of a piece of lawn. In Hogarth's Bridewell scene, the uplifted cane of old Inspector Suspercoll has sometimes been described as out of place; but there Kate is tightly laced up, and in the newspapers of the day special mention is made that Mary Moffat, the type in her "Progress" of many a Hackabout, was then in confinement, "beating hemp in a gown very richly laced with silver." The only alleviating circumstance in the Paisley case is that the sentence might not, or could not, be carried into effect. Mr. Hector, it is but right to state, gives no indication of this being possible, and rather leaves the reader to infer that such an outrage as the sentence indicates was not perpetrated. He writes of the deliverance as being a disgrace to "our" records and to all concerned in carrying it out; and so in every sense it is, but we fear that "our" records may be designed to indicate a wider area than Renfrewshire. There is no reason we know of for believing the people of Paisley to have been more blood-thirsty than their neighbours, or their rulers to have been more Draconian. What occurred in Paisley a century since need not be considered exceptional so far as Scotland is concerned. The fact of the flogging may be a matter of certain and easy proof. Whipping half-naked women through the streets, under form of law, could never be so common even in Paisley but that it must have fixed itself in the memory of some inhabitants likely to speak of the fact to many still living. No doubt there were other important matters exciting discussion in the burgh that week-the trial, among others, of Mungo Campbell for shedding in a poaching squabble the blood of another Montgomery, Alexander, tenth Earl of Eglinton. But even he had such a measure of fairness shown to him in the Justiciary Court that it could not altogether blot out of memory this humiliating case of Jean Montgomery or Storie. Some countenance is given to the merciful theory here suggested as to its being a mere formal sentence from the circumstance that in May, 1735, a certain infirm old Mary Black and her daughter, for what was described as "accession to fire-raising" in a stackyard, were sentenced in the same county to be banished the district, but