HIS FATHER. 9 



become, one day, a leader among the evangelical religion- 

 ists of Scotland. 



Strong, however, as the influence of his Celtic 

 ancestry may have been on Hugh Miller, it was not so 

 powerful as that derived from his Lowland fathers. He 

 was descended on that side from a long line of sea-faring 

 men, whose intrepid and adventurous spirit had led them 

 from their native Cromarty, to sail, in the earliest times 

 of Scottish history, with Sir Andrew Wood or the ' bold 

 Bartons,' and at a later period to voyage and fight under 

 Anson, or to engage in buccaneering enterprises on the 

 Spanish main. For more than a hundred years before 

 the birth of Hugh Miller, not one of his paternal ances- 

 tors had been laid in the churchyard of Cromarty. To 

 the latest hour of his life, he cherished the profoundest 

 enthusiasm for his father, the hardy and resolute seaman 

 whose name he bore. He was only five years old when 

 Hugh Miller, the elder, perished at sea; but he had 

 already learned to love his father with an affection 

 stronger than is common in childhood, and B jJgng, 

 after every one else had ceased to hope,' he might be 

 seen on the grassy knoll behind his mother's house, 

 looking wistfully out upon the Moray frith for ' the 

 Isloop with the two stripes of white and the two square 

 topsails.' 



""Miller has left us, in the Schools and Schoolmasters, 

 a powerful and vivid sketch of his father, and the linea- 

 ments are those of a remarkable man. Very gentle, very 

 brave, serenely invincible in every change of fortune, 

 patient to endure individual wrong, but with a flash of 

 keenest fire in him to avenge the cruelty or injustice 

 which he saw practised on others, he was great without 

 knowing it, and what is also perhaps an advantage, 

 without its being known. Miller says finely that there 



