461 



CHAPTER IV. 



CLOSING SCENES. 



rilHE last time I saw Hugh Miller in his own house 

 JL he mentioned to me that his capacity for work was not 

 what it once had been. He used, he said, to write an article 

 at a sitting ; he now liked to do it in two, relieving 

 himself by a walk in the interval. This was in the sum- 

 mer of 1855, and the weakness which even then was 

 stealing over him continued, month by month, to in- 

 crease. The mason's disease the presence of particles 

 of stone in the lungs augmented the torturing irritation 

 of repeated inflammatory attacks in this most sensitive 

 organ. The tendency to brood to live in a world of 

 thought, and meditation, and phantasy, apart from that 

 of living men which he had manifested from child- 

 hood, grew upon him as his physical energies decayed. 

 That imaginative timidity, also, which had made a man 

 who, if confronted by a lion, would have looked it down, 

 arm himself with pistols against the assassin who might 

 lurk in the recesses of a wooded glen, or haunt a lonely 

 road at midnight, fed itself on the accounts of garotte 

 robberies, house-breakings, outrages by ticket-of-leave 

 men, of which, in the autumn of 1856, the newspapers 

 had more perhaps than the dismal average. Hugh 



