Nevertheless, the search was renewed by his younger brother, Charles Areskine, Lord Justice-Clerk, but without the expected fruit, though a discovery was made of cobalt, and considerable quantities of that valuable mineral were extracted even from the rubbish of his predecessor’s works. In 1767, Lord Alva, the son of the Lord Justice-Clerk, bestowed a pair of silver communion-cups upon the parish of Alva, with an inscription denoting that they were fashioned from silver found at the place. The granting of Steuart as ‘a perpetual servant’ to Sir John Areskine sounds strangely to modern ears; but it was in perfect accordance with law and usage in Scotland in old times; and there was even some vestige of the usage familiar to Englishmen at no remote date, in laws for setting the poor to work in workhouses. The act of the Highland justiciars was the more natural, simple, and reasonable, that labourers in mines and at salt-works were regarded by the law of Scotland as ‘necessary servants,’ who, without any paction, by merely coming and taking work in such places, became bound to servitude for life, their children also becoming bound if their fathers in any way used them as assistants. Such is the view of the matter coolly set down in the _Institutes_ of Mr John Erskine (1754), who further takes leave to tell his readers that ‘there appears nothing repugnant, either to reason, or to the peculiar doctrines of Christianity, in a contract by which one binds himself to perpetual service under a master, who, on his part, is obliged to maintain the other in all the necessaries of life.’ It appears that the salters and miners were transferred with the works when these were sold; but a right in the masters to dispose of the men otherwise, does not appear to have been a part of the Scots law. In the year 1743, there appears to have been a disposition among the bondsmen of the coal-mines in Fife and Lothian to assert their freedom. Fifteen men who worked in the Gilmerton coal-works having absented themselves in October, and gone to [Sidenote: 1701.] work at other collieries, their master, Sir John Baird of Newbyth, advertised them, so that no other master might break the act of parliament by entertaining them, and also that the deserters might be secured. In the same year, the Marquis of Lothian had to complain of three boys who ran away from his colliery at Newbattle, and took refuge amongst the people of another estate, supposed to have been that of the Viscount Oxenford. He accordingly addressed the following letter to that nobleman: ‘NEWBATTLE, _July the 21st, 1743_.