Nevertheless, in November 1704, Captain William Hutcheson, of the province of Maryland, petitioned the Privy Council for liberty to transport to his country six young pickpockets and twenty-two degraded women, then in the correction-house of Edinburgh, who had all ‘of their own choice and consent’ agreed to go along with him; and the request was agreed to, under no [Sidenote: 1698.] other restriction than that he was not to carry away any other persons, and should ‘aliment’ those whom he was to take away until they should leave the country. Nearly about the same time, John Russell, merchant in Edinburgh, was allowed to carry off twenty persons, chiefly women, from the jails of the city, to the plantations. Such were the facts in view when pamphleteers afterwards twitted the rebellious colonists with the taunt that the Adam and Eve of Maryland and Virginia came out of Newgate. [Sidenote: 1699. JAN.] When the Bank of Scotland was started in 1695, there were no notes for sums below five pounds. For the extension of the bank’s paper, there were now issued notes for twenty shillings—ever since a most notable part of the circulating medium in Scotland. These small notes readily got into use in Edinburgh and some parts of the provinces; yet the hopes which some entertained of their obtaining a currency in public markets and fairs were not at first realised—for, as one remarks thirty years later, ‘nothing answers there among the common people but silver money,[245] even gold being little known amongst them.’[246] [Sidenote: JAN. 30.] The funeral of Lady Anne Hall, wife of Sir James Hall of Dunglass, took place at the old church near her husband’s seat, and was attended by a multitude of the nobility and other distinguished persons. A quarrel happened between the respective coachmen of the Earls of Lothian and Roxburgh, for precedence, ‘which was very near engaging the masters, but was prevented.’ It appears that the two noble earls were aspirants for promotion in the peerage, and thus were rendered more irritable.[247] [Sidenote: MAR. 2.] After the _Mercurius Caledonius_ had come to the end of its short and inglorious career in 1661, there was no other attempt at a newspaper in Scotland till 1680, when one was tried under the name of the _Edinburgh Gazette_. This having likewise had a short life, nineteen years more were allowed to elapse before the craving of the public mind for intelligence of contemporary events called for another effort in the same direction.