It appears that Cornelius so far prevailed on the Scots to ‘confederate,’ that they raised a stock of £5000 Scots, equal to about £416 sterling, and worked the mines under royal privileges. According to Atkinson, this adventurer ‘had sixscore men at work in valleys and dales. He employed both lads and lasses, idle men and women, which before went a-begging. He profited by their work, and they lived well and contented.’ They sought for the valuable metal by washing the detritus in the bottoms of the valleys, receiving from their employer a mark sterling for every ounce they realised. So long after as 1619, one John Gibson survived in the village of Crawford to relate how he had gathered gold in these valleys in pieces ‘like birds’ eyes and birds’ eggs,’ the best being found, he said, in Glengaber Water, in Ettrick, which he sold for 6s. 8d. sterling per ounce to the Earl of Morton. Cornelius, within the space of thirty days, sent to the cunyie-house in Edinburgh as much as eight pound-weight of gold, a quantity which would now bring £450 sterling. What ultimately came of Cornelius’s adventure does not appear. He vanishes notelessly from the field. We are told by Atkinson that the adventure was subsequently taken up by one Abraham Grey, a Dutchman heretofore resident in England, commonly called _Greybeard_, from his having a beard which reached to his girdle. He hired country-people at 4d. a day, to wash the detritus of the valleys around Wanlock-head for gold; and it is added, that enough was found to make ‘a very fair deep basin of natural gold,’ which was presented by the Regent Morton to the French king, filled with gold pieces, also the production of Scotland. [Sidenote: 1567-8.] The same valleys were afterwards searched for gold by an Englishman named George Bowes, who also sunk shafts in the rock, but probably with limited success, as has hitherto been experienced in ninety-nine out of every hundred instances, according to Sir Roderick Murchison. * * * * *