THE VALLEY ULSTERMAN:
A CHAPTER OF VIRGINIA HISTORY...continued
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In a recent historical romance, depicting with great beauty of diction and charm of narrative a semi-true story of the days of the persecution in Galloway, occurs a pathetic and touching scene, which emphasises one of their many characteristics handed down from generation to generation. It is the scene where Johnstone of Westerhall, a lieutenant of Claverhouse, with a party of his troopers, has overtaken a crowd of little Cameronian children returning from their hillside school. With the brutality of the times and of his cause, Westerhall sought to frighten the bairns by threatening them with death because they were young covenanting rebels. He told them to put up a prayer before they died. A little girl answered him: "We cannot pray, but we can sing, the Lord's my Shepherd"; and thereupon the quavering notes of Rouse's version of the old psalm floated out over the gray moors from the lips of the little children. As the soldiers turned their horses and rode away to escape the sweet singing, says the chronicler, the sound of the bairns' voices followed after them, and "soughing across the fields came the words:
'Yea, though I walk in Death's dark vale
Yet will I fear none ill;
For Thou art with me: and Thy rod
And staff me comfort still.' "
Nearly a hundred years later, during Pontiac's terrible war, a band of savages attacked a settlement in the Valley of Virginia, and after murdering a number of the settlers, carried away some twenty-five or thirty women and children into captivity. It is veraciously related that "when the Indians had recrossed the Ohio and felt safe from pursuit, they stopped to rest and celebrate their achievements." They required the prisoners to sing for their amusement, as the brutal soldiers of Claverhouse had demanded of the children in those by-gone days of persecution in the old country; and the feeble and helpless company sang, as that other feeble and helpless company had sung for their unfeeling tormentors years before, the psalms of Rouse's version.