8 THE BOY. 



ing of green or purple waters, wreathed with snowy foam. 

 In favourable weather Cromarty is a pleasant place; one 

 who had passed in it a kindly childhood and youth 

 might love it well. Nature, as seen in its vicinity, if 

 not clad in Alpine grandeur, has many aspects of beauty 

 and tenderness, and at least one aspect, that of ocean in 

 calm or in storm, of utmost sublimity. 



Like all towns on the eastern coast of Scotland, 

 Cromarty is inhabited principally by an English-speak- 

 ing race, substantially identical with that found in the 

 lowlands of Scotland. Hugh Miller never spoke the 

 language of the Scottish Highlanders, and was apt in 

 conversation to lay emphasis on the fact of his being a 

 Teuton. But there was a dash of good Celtic bloojd in 

 his veins. Donald Ross, called also DonaldfRoy, or the 

 Red, x the grandfather of his grandmother, was of the best 

 Gaelic type, with the vivacity, courage, and religious sus- 

 ceptibility of his race. The history and character of 

 Donald, as portrayed in the revering narratives of his 

 descendants, were among the sacred influences of Hugh 

 Miller's childhood. The figure of his grey-haired sire, 

 standing up in the Church of Nigg, and defying the 

 Presbytery, in the Name of God, to join a minister, not 

 called by its people, to its stone-walls ; the ring which 

 Miller's grandmother had received, at the time of her 

 marriage, from Donald, as her spousal ring to her other 

 husband, the Head of the Church ; the mysterious hints 

 which would pass round the fireside circle in the evening, 

 that this patriarch, like the men of God of old, had been 

 privileged with visions of the unseen world, with whis- 

 perings out of the abysmal deeps of futurity ; all this 

 was stamped upon the child's imagination, predisposing 

 him, in the dawn of his sympathies, to look with rever- 

 ence on the religious character, and preparing him to 



