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lessly on a vessel's deck on the surrender of the crew, tell where sculls of cuttle-fishes of the ancient type had ceased to trouble the waters. I need scarce add that these spear-like belemnites formed the supposed thunderbolts of the deposit. Lying athwart some of the pages thus strangely inscribed, we occasionally find, like the dark hawthorn leaf in Bewick's well-known vignette, slim-shaped leaves coloured in deepumber; and branches of extinct pines, and fragments of strangely-fashioned ferns, form their more ordinary garnishing. Page after page, for tens and hundreds of feet together, repeat the same wonderful story. The great Alexandrian library, with its tomes of ancient literature, the accumulation of long ages, was but a meagre collection-not less puny in bulk than recent in date-compared with this marvellous library of Scotch Lias." This description were of itself enough to indicate that here was a mind not meant to vegetate among the flats and shallows of science, but possessing sufficient strength to scale her loftiest heights, or penetrate her most abysmal depths and subterranean recesses, clothing the while every nook and cranny, and mantling even her sternest cliffs with the enamel of its own gorgeous aud picturesque vocabulary.

The profession of a mason had been chosen by Hugh Miller because of its winter leisure; and now his first

winter is come, his year of labour is over, and the next three months are all his own. His cousin George is about to visit his father-in-law, an aged shepherd

residing in the upper recesses of Strathcarron. Hugh is invited to accompany him, and gladly he accepts the invitation. The road from Cromarty to Strathcarron was a dreary moor unopened by any public way. The journey enabled him to see something more of the devastating influence of the clearance system. The noonday refreshment of the cousins was eaten in an uninhabited valley, among the ruins of fallen cottages, where once had dwelt some of the best swordsmen in Ross, lost to Scotland by a compulsory emigration. Cousin George came out strongly against the lairds. On arriving at the cottage of their friend, the shepherd, a highlander of large proportions, but hard and thin, and worn by the cares and toils of at least sixty winters, sat moodily beside the fire. Disease had smitten his flocks, and his mind was filled with strange forebodings. He had gone out after nightfall on a previous evening to a dark hollow in which many of his sheep had died. The rain had ceased a few hours before, and a smart frost had set in that filled the whole valley with a wreath of silvery vapour, dimly lighted by the thin fragment of a moon that appeared as if resting on the hill top; when suddenly, the figure of a man, formed as of heated metal, sprung out of the darkness, and after stalking over the surface of the fog for a few brief seconds, as suddenly disappeared, leaving an evanescent trail of flame. The old shepherd had merely seen one of those shooting lights that in mountain districts so frequently startle the night traveller; but the apparition now filled his whole

mind, as one, vouchsafed from the spiritual world, of strange and frightful portent

"A meteor of the night of distant years

That flashed unnoticed, save by wrinkled eld
Musing at midnight upon prophecies."

This visit enabled Hugh to view in the forest of Corrychalgan the last remains of that arboreous condition of our country, to which the youngest of our geological formations, the peat mosses, bear such significant witness, which still largely existing as the condition of the northern countries of Europe, remains to attest, more than even the records of history, the youthfulness of our civilization.

Returned from his highland tour, he made, or perhaps, to speak more correctly, he renewed acquaintance with William Ross. Five years before, Ross had come from the neighbouring parish of Nigg, an apprentice to a house-painter; but though known to each other, there was then too great a disparity between them for friendship. William was a lad of genius, drew truthfully, had a nice sense of the beautiful, and possessed the true poetic faculty; but of melancholy temperament and extremely diffident; thin and pale, fair hair, flat chest, and stooping figure, already a drooping and withered flower; in seven years afterwards, he is in his grave. He had been unfortunate in his parents; his mother, though of a devout family of the old Scottish type, was an aberrant specimen-she had fallen in early youth,

and had subsequently married an ignorant, half-imbecile labourer, with whom she passed a life of poverty and unhappiness; of this unpromising marriage William was the eldest child. From neither of his parents did he derive his genius. His maternal grandmother and aunt were, however, excellent christian women. With them William had lived from an early age. His boyhood had been that of the poet; he had loved to indulge in day-dreams in the solitude of a deep wood beside his grandmother's cottage, had learned to write verses, and draw landscapes, as no one in that locality had written or drawn before; and, as the nearest approach to an artist in those primitive regions was a house-painter, William was despatched to Cromarty, to cultivate his taste for the fine arts, papering rooms and lobbies, and painting railings and wheel-barrows. The house-painter and the stone-mason having once fairly re-established old recognizances, the new friend went a long way to supply the gap which the breaking up of the band to which we have alluded, left in Hugh Miller's acquaintanceship. In their converse together, they beat over all the literature with which they were in common acquainted, and though the literary tastes of William were more circumscribed than the taste of Hugh, in the field of nature both perfectly harmonized. Many a moonlight walk had the friends together, visiting after nightfall the glades of the surrounding woods, listening to the night breeze as it swept sullenly along the pine tops. It is deeply interesting to note the marked

difference in the kind of enjoyment which the youths drew from those lofty images of the sublime and the beautiful with which they were equally enamoured. Hugh Miller, full of hope, joy, and life, yearning for the large excitement the coming years would yield, already looks out upon nature as a companion with whom he is destined to enjoy at once a lengthened and most familiar intercourse. William Ross already carried about with him the consciousness that, in a very special manner, here there was for him no continuing city. The shadow of the cypress shed its sadness into his soul. The joy with which the contemplation of nature filled him, was overcast by the melancholy foreboding that soon her raptures would be for other eyes than his. And yet, ere William has gone to the silent land, as the German Salis has it, we shall meet him valiantly doing battle with labour against capital in the metropolis of our country.

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