It was in the month of January 1688, that Mr Renwick was preaching, after nightfall, to a few followers, at Braid Craigs, in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh. The night was stormy--a cold east wind, with occasional blasts of snow--whilst the moon, in her second quarter, looked out, at intervals, on plaids and bonnets nestled to the leeward of rocks and furze. It was a piteous sight to view rational and immortal creatures reduced to a state upon the level with the hares and the foxes. Renwick discoursed to them from the point of a rock which protruded over the lee side of the Craigieknowe. His manner was solemn and impressive. He was a young man of about twenty-five years of age; and his mother, Elspeth Carson, sat immediately before him--an old woman of threescore and upwards--in her tartan plaid and velvet hood. Her son had been born to a larger promise, and had enjoyed an excellent academic education; and much it had originally grieved the old woman's heart to find all her hopes of seeing him minister of her native parish of Glencairn, blasted; but his conscience would not allow him to conform; and she had followed him in his wanderings and field-preachings, through Ayrshire, Renfrewshire, and all along by the Pentland Hills, to Edinburgh, where a sister of hers was married, and lived in a respectable way on the Castle Hill. This evening, after psalm-singing and prayer, Mr. Renwick had chosen for his text these words, in the fourth verse of the eighteenth chapter of the book of Revelation--"Come out of her, my people." The kindly phrase, "my people," was beautifully insisted upon.