78 THE BANK ACCOUNTANT. 



interests or comforts of her friends. I was employed 

 in writing to her, and with all the freedom which her 

 goodness permitted me, when the letter reached me 

 which intimated her death. My thoughts were so cast into 

 the conversational mould that I could almost realize her 

 presence ; and had she suddenly expired before me, I 

 could not have been more affected/ 



We must not quit this episode in Hugh Miller's life 

 without the remark that it reveals much of what he was. 

 The sister of Sir Alexander Dunbar, Bart., of Boath, 

 moving in the most refined and cultivated society of 

 Scotland, Miss Dunbar was in every sense a lady. Her 

 penetration and sound literary judgment might have con- 

 vinced her that Miller was a man of genius, and led her 

 to desire his acquaintance ; but that that acquaintance 

 should have ripened into friendship nay, that she should 

 have signalized the journeyman mason as the truest and 

 dearest of all her friends can be accounted for only on 

 the supposition that there was in him a sterling worth, a 

 delicate nobleness, a beaming purity of soul and dewy 

 tenderness of feeling, which would have marked him out 

 in any class of society as one of nature's gentlemen. 



