This day began a fall of rain in Moray-land, of ten days’ continuance, and attended by effects which remind us of the celebrated flood of 1829; ‘waters and burns flowing up over bank and brae; corn-mills and mill-houses washen down; houses, kilns, cots, faulds wherein beasts were keipit, all destroyed. The corns, weel stacked, began to moch[75] and rot till they were casten over again. Lamentable to see, and whereof the like was never seen before.... There were four ships lying at anchor in the harbour of Aberdeen; in one of which ships Major Ker and Captain Lumsden had a number of soldiers. Through a great spate[76] of the water of Dee, occasioned by this extraordinary rain, thir haill four ships brake loose, for neither tow nor anchor could hold them, and were driven out at the water mouth, upon the night, and by a south-east wind were driven to the north shore, where thir ships were miserably bladded [beaten] with leaks by striking upon the sands. The soldiers, sleeping carelessly in the bottom of the ship upon heather, were all in a swim, to their great amazement and dread. They got up, with horrible crying and shouting; some escaped, other some pitifully perished. About the number of fourscore and twelve soldiers were wanting, drowned or got away.’--_Slightly altered from Spalding._ * * * * * [Sidenote: OCT. 19.] A quantity of gold had been brought into the kingdom by ‘the adventurers of Guinee.’ It was ordered to be formed into coin by Nicolas Briot and John Falconer, masters of the cunyie-house, according to the arrangements ordered by the Privy Council in April 1625.--_P. C. R._ Some gold subsequently brought from the same country to England by the African Company, ‘administered the first occasion,’ as Clarendon tells us, ‘for the coinage of those pieces which, from thence, had the denomination of _guineas_.’[77] The digging of gold in Guinea is connected in a melancholy way with Scotland, for fifteen hundred of the Scottish prisoners taken at Worcester in September 1651, were granted to the Guinea merchants, ‘to be transported to Guinea to work in the mines there.’[78] * * * * * [Sidenote: DEC. 4.] In the night arose ‘ane horrible high wind,’ which blew down the rafters of the choir of Elgin Cathedral, left without the slates eighty years before. This fact reminds us how much of the destruction of our ancient ecclesiastical buildings was owing, not to actual or immediate damage at the Reformation, but to neglect afterwards. * * * * * [Sidenote: DEC. 26.] [Sidenote: 1637.]