was to me the same thing as if it had not been. And for my ignorance of
it, I must acknowledge that till now, in any service I have been, I
never inquired further in the laws than the orders of my superior
officers." This will not be the only occasion on which Claverhouse will
be found keeping strictly within the lines of his commission, instead
of, as he has been so frequently charged with doing, wantonly and
savagely exceeding it.

This Deputy-Sheriff (or Steward, as the phrase then ran) needs a word to
himself, both on his own account, as representing a certain phase of
character unfortunately too common to the time, and as the real author
of many of the cruel deeds of which Claverhouse so long has borne the
blame. Sir Robert Grierson of Lag was regarded in his own district with
an energy of hatred to which even the terror inspired by Claverhouse
gave place, and which has survived to a time within the memory of men
still living. In the early years of this century the most monstrous
traditions of his cruelty were still current, and are not yet wholly
extinct. In a vaulted chamber of the house in which he lived, on the
English road some three miles south of Dumfries, is still shown an iron
hook from which he is said to have hung his Covenanting prisoners; and
a hill in the neighbourhood is still pointed out as that down which he
used, for his amusement, to send the poor wretches rolling in a barrel
filled with knife-blades and iron spikes,--an ingenious form of torture,
commonly supposed to have been invented by the Carthaginians two
thousand years ago for the particular benefit of a Roman Consul. The
dark and mysterious legend of Sir Robert Redgauntlet, with which
Wandering Willie beguiled the way to Brokenburn-foot, was a popular
tradition of Sir Robert Grierson, or Lag (as, in the familiar style of
the day he was more commonly called) in Scott's own lifetime: the fatal
horseshoe, the birth-mark of all the Redgauntlet line, was believed to