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nd the rare figure of Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty, who had followed Charles II. to the 'crowning mercy' of Worcester fight, to land at last in the Tower. But for the silence of history the imagination or the credulity of the knight has atoned, by the production of a chronicle which rivals fairly the Ecclesiastical History of the old wandering Scottish scholar Dempster, who had in Italy patriotically found the Maccabees to be but an ancient Highland family. According to Urquhart, whose translation

a wedge of Celtic origin, while from the southern shore to the Bay of Munlochy the Scandinavian element again asserts itself. Thus, as Carlyle escaped being born an Englishman by but a few miles, the separation from the Celtic stratum was, in Miller's case, effected by the narrow single line of the one-mile ferry. I

uently republished in his Tales and Sketches under the title of 'A Scottish Merchant of the Eighteenth century.' Forsyth had been appointed by the British Linen Company, established about 1746 in Edinburgh to promote the linen trade, its agent in the North throughout the whole district extending from Beauly to the Pentland Firth. The flax which was brought in vessels from Holland was prepared for use in Cromarty, and distributed by boats along the coast to Wick and Thurso. In the early days of the trade the distaff and the spindle were in general use; but Forsyth's efforts were successful in the introduction of the spinning-wheel, though the older means of production lasted far into this century in the west of Ross

the North, and were, far into this century, found in the houses of Ross, together with the old eight-day clocks made in Kilwinning. But the great founder of its modern prosperity was George Ross, the son of a small proprietor in Easter Ross, who, after amassing a fortune as an army-agent as the friend of Lord Mansfield and the Duke of Grafton, had in 1772 purchased the estate of Cromarty. When he started his improvements in his native district, there was not a wheeled-cart in all the parish, and the knowledge of agriculture was rude. Green cropping and the rotation of crops were unknown, and in autumn the long irregular patches of arable land were intersected by stretches of moorland that wound deviously into the land, like the reaches of the Cromarty and the

in the roof for the smoke. In the Western districts the greatest distress prevailed, for the country was at the parting of the ways in a time of transition. About the beginning of the present century the results of the French Revolution began to make themselves felt. Through the long war the price of provisions rose to famine price, and the impecunious Highland laird, like his more degenerate successor that battens on the sporting proclivities of the Cockney or American millionaire, set himself to the problem of increasing his rent-roll, and the system of evictions and sheep-farming on a large scale commenced. The Sutherland clearances forced the ejected Hig

ney from the place, still turning up or scratching the soil with the old Highland cass-chron, and the women carrying the manure on their backs to the fields in spring, while all the time they kept twirling the distaff-old and faded before their time, like the women in some of the poorer cantons the traveller meets with in Switzerland. Their constant employment was the making of yarn; and, as we have seen, the spinning-wheel was for

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of Rannoch at a time when the observance of the seventh day and of the King's writ never ran beyond the Pass of Killiecrankie. At the Revolution, however, Donald had become the subject of religious convictions; and when, on the death of Balfour of Nigg in 1756, an unpopular presentee, Mr. Patrick Grant, was forced upon the parish, resistance was offered. Four years before this, Gillespie of Carnock had been deposed on the motion of John Home, author of Douglas, seconded by Robertson of Gladsmuir, the subsequent historian of Charles V., for his refusal to participate in the settlement of Richardson to Inverkeithing; and when some of the presbytery, in fear o

e Indiaman when in a state of mutiny, after a brief experience of the stern discipline of the navy not yet tempered by the measures of reform introduced after the mutiny of the Nore, he returned when not much turned thirty to Cromarty, where his savings enabled him to buy a coasting sloop and set up house. For this the site was purchased at ￡400, a very considerable sum in those days, and thus his son could, even in the high franchise qualifications after the Reform Bill, exercise the right of voting for the Whig party. The kelp trade, of which we have spoken, among other t

oor, which had been left unfastened, fell open, and I was despatched from her side to shut it. I saw at the open door, within less than a yard of my breast, as plainly as ever I saw anything, a dissevered hand and arm stretched towards me. Hand and arm were apparently those of a female: they bore a livid and sodden appearance; and, directly fronting me, where the body ought to have been, there was only blank transparent space, through which I could see the dim forms of the objects beyond. I commemorate the story as it lies fixed in

e new house which his father had built remained for some little time after his death untenanted; and, as the insurance of the sloop was deferred or disputed by an insolvent broker, his mother had recourse to her needle as the means by which she could best support her family. Thre

de of Scottish life, they will merit a detailed account. Of this type some little knowledge had been made known by Lord Jeffrey in his review of Cromek's Reliques, where such men as the father of Burns and those of his immediate circle were first introduced to their proper place as those 'from whom old Scotia's grandeur springs.'

uld fix his bench by the hearth, and listen while his nephew or his own younger brother or some neighbour would read. In the summer, he would occupy his spare hours upon his journeys to and from his rural rounds of labour in visiting every scene of legend and story far and

much of the cheap sentiment introduced into the current of Scottish life by writers such as Smiles and others, who profess to be ever finding some 'peasant' or 'uneducated genius' in the subjects of their all too unctuous biographies. Such a class has really no existence in Scotland, and between such men as Miller, Burns, or even the unfortunate and sorely buffeted Bethunes, there is a great gulf fixed when they are sought to be brought into relation with men like John Clare and Robert Bloomfield. All the Scotchmen, born in however originally humble circumstances, had the advantage of education at the parish school; and, slight though in some cases the result may have been, it yet for ever removes the possibility of illiteracy which the English reader at once conjures up at the sound of such surroundings. The more the critic studies the facts of Burns' early years and education, and the really remarkable stock of information with which he was to rouse the honest won

Gulliver's Travels-both never so familiar in Scotland to boys as they are in England-Cook's Voyages, John Howie of Lochgoin's Worthies, the Voyages of Anson, Drake, Raleigh, Dampier, and Byron, 'my grand-dad's narrative' of the poet. It was not till his tenth year that he became, as he says, 'thoroughly a Scot,' and this was effected by a perusal of Blind Harry's Wallace, that 'Bible of the Scottish people,' as Lord Hailes has called it, following or anticipating the remark by Wolf as to the similar position of the Iliad and the Odyssey among the Greeks. No one now need be informed about the influence that quaint old work had produced in Burns, and through him on the subsequent re-awakening of the n

Latin was increased by his persuading the willing Uncle James to set Miller to the Rudiments in that time-honoured volume by Ruddiman, who had in his own days been a first bursar at Aberdeen. The teaching of Latin had been one of the props to education introduced by the Reformers, and so distinct had been the little note of pedantry, perhaps in this way fostered, that Smollett makes the barber in Roderick Random quote Horace in the original, and Foote in a farce has made a valet insist on its possession as a shibboleth of nationality. We need but mention the favourite quotations in the ancient tongue by the Baron of Bradwardine and Dugald Dalgetty as a reminiscence of his own old days 'at the Marischal College'; while Miller also could remember an old cabinet-maker who carried for the sake of the big print a Latin New Testament to church. But no more with him than with Darwin could the linguistic faculty be stimulated. The Rudiments he thought the dullest book he had ever seen, and though i

se style. But he was rapidly finding his national and true school. The Hill of Cromarty, part of De Beaumont's Ben-Nevis system, and the rich Liassic deposit of Eathie, were his favourite haunts, and his uncle Alexander, after his own work was done, would spend with him many an hour in the ebb tide. To the training thus acquired from this untaught naturalist he owed much of his own close powers of observation, which led, however, well-nigh to a fatal termination through an adventurous visit to the Doo-cot caves, from which he was rescued late at night during a high tide. This formed the subject of his first copy of juvenile verse, w

forth by the great French engineer Vauban. With sand for towers, and variegated shells and limpets for soldiers, he worked his way through the evolutions of troops, and no reader of Scott will fail to remember the similar a

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rmittent seasons, afford him plenty leisure. Against this resolution both his uncles stoutly protested, and were prepared to assist him to the Northern university. 'I had no wish,' he says, 'and no peculiar fitness to be either lawyer or doctor; and as for the Church, that was too serious a direction to look in for one's bread, unless one could necessarily regard one's-self as called to the Church's proper work, and I could not.' His uncles agreed to this view of the case; and so, reluctantly, the proposed course was abandoned. 'Better be anything,' they said, 'than an uncalled minister.' His was not the feeble sense of fitness possessed in such a high degree by the presentees to Auchterarder and Marnoch. As a member of the Moray nation he would naturally have proceeded to King's College in Aberdeen, then at the very lowest ebb of its existence as regards the abilities, or the want of them, of th

ed an apprentice or two, he was bound apprentice for three years, from February 1820 to November 1822 and entered on the trade of mason and quarryman, for in the North the combination was constant. Long after, in the Ol

gone by had been happy beyond the common lot. I had been a wanderer among rocks and woods-a reader of curious books when I could get them-a gleaner of old traditional stories; and now I was going to exchange all my day-dreams and all my amusements for the kind of life in which men toil every day that they may be enabled to eat, and eat every day that they may be enabled to toil. T

building farm-steadings or outhouses, with but scanty shelter and in surroundings too often unfavourable to comfort or morality. His experience of the bothy-system thus acquired by personal hardship he was in later years to turn to account in his leaders in The Witness-'I have lived,' he says, 'in hovels that were invariably flooded in wet weather by the over-flowings of neighbouring swamps, and through whose roofs I could tell the hour at night, by marking from my bed the stars that were passing over the openings along the ridge.' He was now to feel the truth of his uncles' warnings in dissuading him from the occupation. They had pointed to a hovel on a laird's property, who had left it standing that at some future date it might be turned to profit when he should have a drove of swine, or when a 'squad' of

land smuggler, or consist of hastily prepared gruel or brochan. In time he learned to be a fair plain cook and baker, so as at least to satisfy the demands of the failing teeth of his old master. Accordingly, he was not

called upon to convert the materials of this hovel into the new building upon which they were engaged. This they effected by demolishing the entrance gradually, and hanging mats over it, leaving themselves ultimately to the cold October wind which not even Miller's experiences as a boy of the caves in the Suto

hronicled in the well-known lines of his friend, Dr. Longmuir of Aberdeen. Indeed the latter had for him peculiar associations through one of the Ross-shire worthies in the times of Charles II.-James Fraser of Brea;-for, when the sun set on the upland farm on which he had been born, Miller knew that it was time to collect his tools at the end of his day's labour. In 1847, when he visited the rock on the geological expedition which he has commemorated by his paper on the structure of the Bass, his thoughts again reverted to Fraser, and to two other captives from his own district, Mackilligen of Alness and Hog of Kiltearn. His uncle James had at an early period introduced him to Burns and Fergusson, while from his boyish days the old novel of Smollett, Humphrey Clinker, had been no less familiar than from the pages of David Copperfield we know it to have been to Dickens. It was,