HUGH MILLER. IX, 



mily burying-ground, if we judge from the past, seems to be 

 the sea. Under its green waves his father sleeps ; his grand- 

 father, his two granduncles, one of whom sailed round the 

 world with Anson, lie also there ; and the same extensive 

 cemetery contains the relics of several of his more distant re- 

 latives. His father was but an infant of scarcely a year old 

 at the death of our author's grandfather, and had to com- 

 mence life as a poor ship-boy ; but such was the energy of 

 his mind, that, when little turned of thirty, he had become 

 the master and owner of a fine large sloop, and had built 

 himself a good house, which entitled his son to the franchise 

 on the passing of the Reform Bill. Having, unfortunately, 

 lost his sloop in a storm, he had to begin the world anew, 

 and he soon became master and owner of another, and would 

 have thriven, had he lived ; but the hereditary fate was too 

 strong for him; and when our author was a little boy of five 

 summers, his father's fine new sloop foundered at sea in a 

 terrible tempest, and he and his crew were never more heard 

 of. Mr Miller had two sisters younger than himself, both 

 of whom died ere they attained to womanhood. His mother 

 experienced the usual difficulties which a widow has to en- 

 counter in the decent education of her family ; but she strug- 

 gled honestly and successfully, and ultimately found her re- 

 ward in the character and fame of her son. It is from this 

 excellent woman that Mr Miller has inherited those senti- 

 ments and feelings which have given energy to his talents as 

 the defender of revealed truth, and the champion of the 

 Church of his fathers. She was the great-grand-daughter of 

 a venerable man, still well known to tradition in the north 

 of Scotland as Donald Koy of Nigg, — a sort of northern 

 Peden, who is described in the history of our Church as the 

 single individual who, at the age of eighty, when the Preoby- 

 tery of the district had assembled in the empty church for the 

 purpose of inducting an obnoxious presentee, had the courage 



