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TRANSACTIONS. 133 
Then, and only then, your lovely image shall be produced to the day, with 
a reverence akin to devotion.” 
IV. Dumfries in the Past. By Mr Peter Gray of Camberwell. 
(Abridged. ) 
Whilst engaged in some researches among the books and 
MSS. in the British Museum I came upon several references to 
Dumfries, not perhaps very widely known, and I thought that 
these, with some others occurring in books in my own possession, 
although in themselves not of very much intrinsic importance, might 
prove interesting to the members of the Society. They are not of 
very great antiquity either, the earliest direct notice of the town 
occurring in one of the Itineraries of John Ray. Ray was perhaps 
the greatest naturalist between the times of Aristotle and Linnzus, 
and his Itineraries are records of what were termed in his day 
“simpling voyages,” what are now known as botanical excursions 
or rambles. Three of these journals were published after his 
death, and it is from the second of them I am now going to quote. 
He entered Scotland by way of Berwick in the middle of August, 
1661, passed on to Edinburgh, thence to Glasgow, and from 
Glasgow, through Lanarkshire, to Carlisle. “ August, the 24th,” 
he writes, “‘ we rode to Dumfreis, or, as they spelled it, Drumfrese. 
At Dumfreis they have two ministers—one a young 
man named Campbell, related, as we are told, to the M. of 
Argyle; the other an elder man, by name Henderson, who has 
married his daughter to the younger. Campbell prayed for the 
preservation of their Church government and discipline, and spoke 
openly against prelacy and its adjuncts and consequences. Here, 
as also at Dunbar and other places, we observed the manner of 
their burials, which is this: When any one dies, the sexton, or 
bellman, goeth about the streets with a small bell in his hand, 
which he tinkleth all along as he goeth, and now and then he 
makes a stand and proclaims who is dead, and invites the people 
to come to the funeral at such an hour. The people and minister 
many times accompany the corpse to the grave at the time 
appointed, with the bell before them, where there is nothing said, 
but only the corpse laid in. The minister there, in the public 
worship, does not shift places out of the desk into the pulpit, as 
in England, but at his first coming in ascends the pulpit. They 
commonly begin their worship with a psalm before the minister 
comes in, who, after the psalm is finished, prayeth, and then reads 
