In August 1829, when extraordinary floods devastated a great part of Scotland, a stirring episode occurred in connection with them and the mail-coach running through Banff. The tradition that his Majesty’s mails were to be stopped for nobody and hindered by nothing on the road was a very fine and fearless one, but it was occasionally pushed to absurd lengths, and hideous dangers provoked without reasonable cause. This episode of the Banff and Inverness Mail is a case in point. The mail of the preceding day had found it impracticable to go by its usual route, and so took another course, by the Bridge of Alva. It was therefore supposed that the mail following would adopt the same plan; but what was the astonishment of the good folk of Banff when they perceived the coach arrive, within a few minutes of its usual time, at the farther end of the bridge that crosses the River Dovern. The people, watching the eddying floods from the safe vantage-point of their windows, strongly dissuaded the guard and coachman from attempting to pass, the danger being so great; but, scouting the idea of perils to be encountered in the very streets of the town, those foolhardy persons drove straight along the bridge and into a street that had been converted by the bursting of the river-bank into the semblance of a mountain torrent. When the furious current caught the coach, it was instantly dashed against the corner of Gillan’s Inn, and the four animals swept off their legs. They rose again, plunging and struggling for their lives, and a boat was pushed off, with men eager to free the poor animals from their harness, to enable them to swim away; but it was not possible to save more than one. The other three were drowned. By this time the coach, with coachman and guard, had been flung upon the pavement, where the depth of water was less; and there the guard was seen, clinging to the top, and the coachman hanging by his hands from a lamp-post, regretting too late the official ardour and slavery to tradition that had wrought such havoc. When, for humanity’s sake, as well as to secure the mail-bags, a boat came and rescued them, they were not suffered to depart without much Aberdonian plain-speaking on the folly that had nearly cost them their lives and endangered the correspondence of the good folks of the ancient burgh of Banff. [Illustration: MAIL-COACH IN A SNOW-DRIFT. _After J. Pollard._ ]