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66 Docuniciits passengers of a ship wrecked at Walls, a few miles away, and con- fined there for a time by reason of the infection among them. It was an emigrant ship. The Rev. Mr. Mill says in his Diary^ con- cerning it : "A vessel from Leith with 260 emigrants for North Carolina was by stress of weather put into Vela Sound in Walls. The smallpox at same time carried off severals, and some of their children crammed in the hold were said to be stifled to death and thrown overboard into the sea, before they landed ; after which the vessel was driven from her anchors, and so damaged that they could not, for several months, put to sea again. The people were dispersed through the several parishes for subsistence accord- ing to the Sheriff's decreet. They went back for Leith in April, and the project for America thereby miscarried." But only two direct references to John Harrower have been discovered in Lerwick records. One shows him, as one of the heritors or landholders of the parish, attending a meeting in De- cember, 1765, which votes to send to Scotland for a supply of oat- meal for the poor. The other, January 14 of the same year, is the record of his admission into the Morton Lodge of Freemasons, — " Harrower, John, Merchant, Lerwick." In records at Edinburgh Mr. Grant finds evidence that he came to Shetland after 1750. He also finds in the Sasine Register, under date of 1762, 1767 and 1770, three evidences of tenements held by "John Harrower mer- chant in Lerwick and Anna Graham his spouse." This would seem to have been a previous wife ; or the pair may possibly have been our Harrower's father and mother. Evidently Harrower was a minor person in Lerwick. Yet he wrote a very good hand, and was fairly well educated at a time when schools hardly existed in Shetland. Whatever may have been the cause of his leaving home (there is no fuller indication than that contained in his letter to his brother-in-law), every page of the diary shows that he was frugal and industrious to a high degree, and he was evidently much regarded by Colonel Daingerfield. Finally, if Jock, his oldest child, was born in November, 1762, he may not improbably have been thirty-five or forty when he left Lerwick. Nothing more is known of his subsequent life than that, after his sojourn at "Belvidera," he became a sort of manager at "Moss Neck," near Fredericksburg, the home of Richard Corbin. For this information, and for some of the footnotes, we are indebted to Mrs. Robins. As to Mrs. Harrower, Mr. Goudie writes : " His wife belonged to one of the leading families in the town — the Craigies of Stebbiegrind. A portion of the sea-front of the town still ■ Diary of the Rn'crenJ James Mill (Scottish History Society, V.), p. 40.