The field preacher Gabriel Semple was incarcerated in the Canongate Tolbooth in 1681. But it was only a brief interlude in a long history of preaching despite persecution. We find out how his experience here fits into the rest of that eventful life of being hunted down with a large price on his head. “What does it matter” he once asked, “how long we suffer in the furnace if [it is] with the company of the Son of God?”