ten o'clock
Accordingly , he so set himself , that Mungo Robeson consented to leave the keys of the tolbooth with him ; and for several nights everything was so managed that he had no reason to suspect what my wife and I were plotting ; for he being of a modest and retiring nature , never spoke to her when she parted from me , save when she thanked him as he let her out ; and that she did not do every night lest it should grow into a habit of expectation with him , and cause him to remark when the civility was omitted . In the meantime all things being concerted between us , through the mean of a friend a cart was got in readiness , loaded with seemingly a hogget of tobacco and grocery wares , but the hogget was empty and loose in the head . This was all settled by the nineteenth of December ; on the twenty-fourth of the month the Commissioners appointed to try the Covenanters in the prisons throughout the shire of Ayr were to open their court at Ayr , and I was , by all who knew of me , regarded in a manner as a dead man . On the night of the twentieth , however , shortly before ten o'clock , James Gottera , our friend , came with the cart in at the town-head port , and in going down the gait stopped , as had been agreed , to give his beast a drink at the trough of the cross-well , opposite the tolbooth-stair foot . When the clock struck ten , the time appointed , I was ready dressed in my wife 's apparel , having , in the course of the day , broken the chain of the shackle on my arm ; and the door being opened by Willie Sutherland in the usual manner , I came out , holding a napkin to my face and weeping in sincerity very bitterly , with the thought of what might ensue to Sarah Lochrig , whom I left behind in my place . In reverence to my grief the honest man said nothing , but walked by my side till he had let me out at the outer stair-head door , where he parted from me , carrying the keys to Mungo Robeson 's house , aneath the tolbooth , while I walked towards James Gottera 's cart , and was presently in the inside of the hogget . With great presence of mind and a soldierly self-possession , that venturous friend then drew the horse 's head from the trough , and began to drive it down the street to the town-end port , striving as he did so to whistle , till he was rebuked for so doing , as I heard , by an old woman then going home , who said to him that it was a shame to hear such profanity in Irvine when a martyr doomed to die was lying in the tolbooth .