APPENDIX.
Having been favoured by the publishers of the Courant and Mercury with an inspection of such early volumes of their venerable journals as they respectively possess, I have caused a few curious but comparatively trivial paragraphs to be copied for insertion in this place. To these are added a few notices of a characteristic nature from other sources:
1720. Sep.
‘Edinburgh, September 19.—Upon the 17th instant, the Right Honourable the Earl of Wemyss was married to the only child of Colonel Charteris, a fortune of five hundred thousand pounds sterling, English money, which probably in a short time may be double that sum. But that is nothing at all in comparison of the young lady herself, who is truly, for goodness, wit, beauty, and fine shapes, inferior to no lady of Great Britain; all which the very noble earl richly deserves, being a most complete and well-accomplished gentleman, and the lineal representative of a most noble, great, and ancient family in Scotland of five or six hundred years’ standing,’ &c.—Contemporary Journal.
1722. Aug. 13.
‘Last week Sir Robert Sibbald of Kipps, M.D., Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, died here in the 83d year of his age. He was a person of great piety and learning, and author of many learned and useful books, especially in natural history.’—C. M.
On the 11th November 1723, a number of people proceeding from Galashiels and its neighbourhood to attend a fair at Melrose, and crossing the Tweed in a ferry-boat at Nether Barnsford, near what afterwards became Abbotsford, were thrown by the oversetting of the boat into the water, then in flood, and eighteen of them drowned. A boy named Williamson, son of a tradesman in Galashiels, was preserved in a wonderful way. Thrown at first to the bottom of the river, he caught a man by the hair of his head, and was thus enabled to rise to the surface. There he was kept afloat by grasping, first by a bundle of lint, and then a sackful of gray cloth, letting go each in succession as it became saturated with water. Then a deal from the ‘lofting’ of the boat came near him, and he grasped it firmly below his breast. Meanwhile he was moving rapidly down the stream. There was a place where formerly a bridge had been, and where three piers yet stood in the water. It was with difficulty he got through one of the spaces, and over a cascade on the lower side of the bridge. Sometimes, thrown on his back, he was under water for thirty or forty yards, but he never let go the deal. At length, after going considerably more than a mile in this manner, he was taken up by the West-house-boat, the manager of which had been warned of his coming, and of his possible preservation, by a ploughman mounted on a horse which, escaping from the overset boat, had swum ashore, in time to admit of this rapid and dexterous movement—C. M.
1724. June 2.
There was this day buried in the Greyfriars’ Churchyard, the wife of Captain Burd of Ford, ‘thought to be the largest woman in Scotland.’ ‘Her coffin was a Scots ell and four inches wide, and two feet deep.’—E. E. C.
1725. Feb. 18.