dressing the wounded and watching the sick, under the pressure of hunger and amidst scenes shocking to delicacy. They encouraged the men to maintain the siege and die honourably fighting rather than fall into the hands of the besieging papists. About the middle of June the fleet, sent under the command of Major General Kirke, for the relief of the city, came in sight. The famished inhabitants rang the bells for joy. In consternation they saw it speedily depart. In a few days Kirke came in sight again, but did nothing effectual towards supplying the perishing inhabitants from the transports laden with provisions sent expressly for their relief. Messenger after messenger was sent from the town, and promise after promise of speedy assistance was sent back. The fleet again disappeared, and again returned to the sight of the famished inhabitants and mocked their hopes with the heavily laden transports. The General suffered in his reputation for these manoeuvres, and made no satisfactory statement, further than his fears that his fleet could not encounter the fortifications, nor break the boom thrown across the harbour.

On the 16th of July, while the horrors of the siege were accumulating on Derry, Claver'se, the firm ally of James in Scotland, noted in the history of the sufferings of the Covenanters, impatient of waiting longer for the French and Irish forces detained at Derry, and irritated by the advance of the forces of King William into Scotland, gives battle at Killikrankie. Rushing on with his usual impetuosity he routed the opposing flanks, and pressing on to cut off their retreat through a narrow pass, he outrode his troops. Wheeling and raising his right hand above his head, to beckon his men, he received a fatal wound through the opening in his armour, and fell about the setting of the sun. His men gathered around him, carried him to his quarters, dressed his wound, and tried to cheer his spirits. The route of William's forces was complete. On the next day, having received a detail of the victory and dictated a letter to James, entreating a reinforcement, and stating that his wound was severe, but, he was told, not mortal, this scourge of the Covenanters passed to his last account. With him perished the fruits of his victory, and all the hopes of James in Scotland. The Siege of Derry must continue till the cause of James was ruined.

At last, when the last rations in Derry were dealt out to the famished inhabitants,—a half a pint of meal per man, when all were in dismay and certain expectation of death, their relief came. The ships were once more in sight. The starving inhabitants and unconquered soldiers gloated upon the distant fleet that tantalized their misery. But the fleet now came into the harbour. The Rev. James Gordon of Clondomat, near

Derry, who advised to the shutting of the gates, was compelled to leave his congregation by the barbarity of the besieging forces, and fled to Scotland. Hearing of the delay of Kirke, and the assigned reasons, he took a boat at Greenock, crossed over Loch Foyle, and got on board the fleet, and endeavoured by arguments and reproaches to stimulate the officers and men to afford the necessary relief. Kirke had a private interview with him, and for a time seemed doubtful whether to consider him a friend or a rash disorganizer. Gordon gave Kirke a plan of the harbour from his own knowledge, and finally persuaded him that the relief of the city was in his power. Kirke never mentioned this interview in any of his accounts of the siege. There is, however, no doubt of its having taken place.

About six o'clock in the afternoon of the Sabbath, July 28th, a moderate gale springing up, from the Northwest, the Dartmouth weighed anchor and stood towards Culmore. The fort immediately opened a brisk cannonade. Captain Leake fired neither great nor small shot, till he came on the wind of the castle; then he began to batter the walls, and sheltered the transports, casting anchor within musket shot of the fort. The Mountjoy passed the fort accompanied by the long boat of the Swallow prepared to cut the boom. She sailed on through a well directed fire from both sides of the river, and striking against the boom is repelled and runs aground. Her gallant commander is killed at the same moment by a musket ball. Favoured by the rising tide, and rebounding from a broadside discharged for the purpose, the Mountjoy soon floated again; and the boatswain's mate of the Swallow having cut the boom, the vessel once more in motion, by its weight breaks through that formidable barrier. The Phoenix followed by the Mountjoy, and towed all the way by the Swallow's boats, reached the quay about ten o'clock in the evening, to the inexpressible joy of the famished garrison, who had been watching with intense interest every turn and pause in their progress up the river. In two days the Siege of Derry was raised, and the cause of James was hopeless.

De Rosen despaired of bringing the city to a surrender and withdrew his army. The besiegers lost about nine thousand men around the walls of Derry, and about a hundred of the best officers perished. The joy of the besieged knew no bounds. Public thanksgivings to Almighty God were rendered by the people at large, and private rejoicings filled every house, that the hand of the destroyer was stayed. The news of the relief of Derry reached William at Hampton Court, on the 4th of August, by a messenger despatched by Kirke the morning after the vessels reached the quay; and to him it was the happy assurance that his crown was safe, and the war in

fact decided. Scotland rejoiced in the happy termination of that siege, which had been the indirect means of the downfall of one who had hunted his fellow Protestants like a remorseless bloodhound. The whole land echoed the praises of the brave defenders of Derry: and William loaded some of the leading men with rich presents. But many of the greatest labourers shared the smallest permanent advantages.

Of the commanding officers in the Siege of Derry, such as colonels and field officers, the majority were of the Church of England. Of the captains and inferior officers the majority were Presbyterians; and of the soldiers and the inhabitants, there were fifteen Presbyterians to one Episcopalian. And yet, after this important siege, while the Episcopal Church was established in England, and the Presbyterians in Scotland, in Ireland,-where there was a mixture of Presbyterians and Episcopalians, the Presbyterians, by whose bravery and sufferings the kingdom had been secured to the Prince of Orange, were compelled, after the Government was settled, to pay their tithes to the established church, and maintain their own ministers, and also to suffer other disabilities consequent on an Establishment. The soldiers in this siege were never paid the common wages of soldiers, for their sufferings from disease and famine, and their exposure to the worst forms of death. After two and thirty years of fruitless negotiations, there remained due to the eight regiments upwards of £74,000 sterling, not a farthing of which was ever paid.

The endurance of such multiplied sufferings by the people of Derry, in a place so small and rendered offensive by the putrid corpses of the multitudes that perished, for whom only the slightest burial could be obtained, and that slight burial torn up by dogs and the shot and shells from the enemy's camp, is marvellous; and that in the midst of their sufferings they should answer the summons to surrender, by the resolution“that no man on the pain of death should speak of surrendering the city," cannot be accounted for except that in their strong adherence to strong principles, the Almighty God held them up. That the feeble looking walls, which to human appearance might so easily have been battered down, remained unshaken; and the town which lay so fair to the shot of the enemy, should have escaped destruction, is wonderful. When De Rosen first beheld the place, he expressed his utter contempt, and declared "he would make his men bring it to him stone by stone"-and impiously swore, "by the belly of God," that he would demolish it and bury the defenders in its ruins. But the threatened walls stand yet.

After Ireland was subdued to the government of William, and the prospects of the Presbyterians not much improved even

by the Toleration Act, reports full of hope from America reached the people of Ulster, and lured them once more to try the Atlantic. More than half a century had passed since the Eagle Wing had sailed and been driven back. Once more emigrants venture out, and the smiles of Providence are on their voyage. A part of the work for which they had been detained in Ireland was fully accomplished; and now they were sent to act an important part in the wilds of America. Ship load after ship load sailed for America from Ulster. And not a few from Derry sought the provinces in the new world. For half a century the emigration filled the frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia. One lady, whose ashes repose in the oldest burying ground in the Valley of the Shenandoah, that of the Opeckon church, and whose descendants in Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, and Tennessee, are reckoned by scores and by hundreds, used to speak with tears of that memorable siege, and lament in bitterness "two fair brothers," whose death filled up in part the measure of sufferings at Derry. Devotedly pious herself, she is honoured by the fact, that a large proportion of her descendants have professed the religion of their mother, Mary Gamble Glass, the wife of Samuel Glass, and sister of the Gambles that settled in Augusta. And in Augusta those brothers reared families worthy of their ancestry; their names are not unknown in Virginia and the South. The names of the "Apprentices" are familiar names in the Valley of the Shenandoah.

The principles in exercise at Derry, were the principles to fit men for subduing a wilderness, and building a State, where there should be no king, no state religion.

Note.-For a more extended history of the Siege of Derry-consult Graham's History of the Siege—and Reed's History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland.

CHAPTER VI.

PRESBYTERIAN COLONIES IN VIRGINIA.

FOR some years after the death of Makemie there was no congregation or colony of Presbyterians in Virginia. There were families of Scotch and Scotch Irish scattered through the province engaged in trade. Their influence in the colony was small. There were some families that had connected themselves with the Presbyterian church in the time. of Makemie, but not in neighbourhoods sufficient to sustain

a pastor. The colony of persecuted French Huguenots that had been invited to Virginia, and seated on the James River a little above Richmond, and protected in their worship, had voluntarily scattered and become intermingled with the English population in the neighbouring counties. The fairest opportunity was given to the Established Church to show her power and usefulness. Could she have possessed a sufficient number of pious men devoted to the work of the ministry, such as Blair attempted to provide by the College of William and Mary, she would now be the prominent and popular church, below the head of tide water in Virginia.

The majority of the numerous Presbyterian families, in Vir ginia, are descendants of emigrants from Presbyterian countries in Europe. Poverty and intolerance drove them from their mother country, and the necessity of providing a frontier line of brave people west of the Blue Mountains, compelled Virginia to relax her rigor and open her borders. There was never a large colony of Scotch in Virginia, though multitudes of Scotch families have been scattered through the land. The Presbyterians in Ulster province, Ireland, found their situation less agreeable than they had reason to expect, under William and Mary, and Anne, and George 1st, and George 2d. The Episcopal Church was favoured in England, the Presbyterian in Scotland; in Ireland the Presbyterians of Ulster were taxed to support the Established Church of England, which was not more numerous or loyal. From the time of the Eagle Wing to the siege of Derry, the emigration to America had been small. In the early part of the Eighteenth Century the emigration began, and like the mighty rivers in the new world, went on in a widening and deepening current, to pour into the vast forests of America, multitudes of hardy enterprising people. All the colonies from New York southward were enriched by ship loads of these people that came with little money, but with strong hands and stout hearts, and divine principles, to improve their own condition, and bless the province that gave them a home. A few congregations were formed in the New England States; one in New Hampshire at Londonderry in 1719;-another at Pelham, Massachusetts, and a small one in Boston about 1727. Pennsylvania offered the greatest attractions; and the banks of the Delaware gave the first rest to these pilgrims of "the green isle." The beautiful unoccupied regions in Pennsylvania, east of the mountains, were soon filled with thriving congregations. Holmes tells us, that in 1729-"there arrived in Pennsylvania from Europe, 6208 persons, for the purpose of settling in that colony." Of these more than five thousand were from Ireland. Mr. Samuel Blair writing about the congregation of New Londonderry, in Fagg's Manor, states-"The congregation has not