SiVOlV AND FLOODS 165 



pitiful expedient of standing on their seats and so 

 — keeping the douhled-up attitude this necessity 

 and the lowness of the roof imjieratively demanded 

 — remaining until the levels were passed and the 

 dry uplands reached again. 



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 he 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 jireceding day had found it im- 

 practicable 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 

 adojit the same plan ; but what was the astonish- 

 ment of the good folk of Banff Avhen they perceived 

 the coach arrive, within a few minutes of its usual 

 time, at the farther end of the bridge that crosses 

 the Biver Dovern. The people, watching the 

 eddying floods from the safe vantage-point of their 

 Avindows, strongly dissuaded the guard and coach- 

 man from attempting to j^ass, 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 



