REMINISCENCES. 443 



borealis. I must remember to bring to the chiidren a 

 few shells which, though common here, are rare at 

 Portobello. 



' I have just returned from a walk along the hill- 

 side. I have been in the old chapel and seen poor 

 Eliza's little tomb-stone, half buried in long grass ; I 

 have looked out on the sea from the " Broad Bank/' and 

 down upon the Dripping Cave and the Lover's Leap ; 

 and in looking back on more than twenty years when we 

 used to meet, evening after evening, among the trees, 

 I felt how surely life is passing. It is now more 

 than fifteen years since we buried Eliza. The hill is 

 changed, like all else about Cromarty, and our haunt, 

 right over the Doocot Cave, with its scattered beech-trees 

 and its thick screen of tall firs, is now a bare, heathy 

 slope, without shrub or tree. The view, however, from 

 the corner part of the hill down upon the town and bay 

 is still fine as ever, the forest trees, which are still 

 spared, are in fresh leaf, though Ben Wyvis continues 

 to retain his patches of snow, and the winding outline of 

 the Frith is so much beyond the reach of improvement 

 that it cannot be spoiled.' 



It probably tended to deepen the pensiveness of his 

 mood at this time that he found one of his dearest and 

 oldest friends battling stiffly with the res angusta domi. 

 How, thought Miller, can I contrive to assist him ? He 

 well knew that a friendship of forty years did not give 

 him, in dealing with a proud spirit, the right to offer a 

 pecuniary gift. He would try, he wrote Mrs Miller, 

 whether a loan might not be accepted. Mrs Miller, 

 hastily reading his letter, mistook his meaning, and 

 thought, while cordially sympathizing, that the loan had 

 been applied for. He wrote as follows in reply. 



