12 THE BOY. 



change or excitement, a storm, a removal, a journey, a 

 visit to a puppet show or wax-work. The forms of those 

 natural objects by which a child is surrounded, leaves, 

 trees, flowers, fall faintly on the mental tablets ; pro- 

 bably not one man in a thousand retains a more vivid 

 recollection of them than of the curtains round his cra- 

 dle. During Hugh Miller's life, the observation of a 

 new fact in nature afforded him a thrill of pleasure 

 which never lost its freshness, and it seems probable 

 that the first consciousness of this pleasure arose in the 

 breast of small, toddling, large-headed Hugh, when he 

 opened wide his eyes to take the bearings of the myste- 

 rious duckling and the vegetable mussels. 



More definitely important, in a biographic point of 

 view, are those incidents of Miller's childhood which 

 formed what he calls a ' machinery of the supernatural.' 

 About the time when the incomprehensible duckling 

 grew out of the earth before his eyes, he thought that 

 he beheld the apparition of his buccaneering ancestor, 

 John Feddes, ' in the form of a large, tall, very old man, 

 attired in a light-blue great-coat,' who stood on the 

 landing-place at the top of the stairs and regarded him 

 with apparent complacency. He was much frightened, 

 and for years dreaded a reappearance of the phantom. 



Still more circumstantial is his account of what he 

 saw on that night when, far away on the North Sea, 

 his father's ship went down. * There were no fore- 

 bodings,' he is careful to tell us, in the Cromarty cot- 

 tage. No storm agitated the air, and though the 

 billows of a deep ground-swell broke heavily under 

 leaden skies, the weather occasioned no alarm. A 

 hopeful letter had been received from his father, written 

 at Peterhead, and his mother sat ' beside the household 

 fire, plying the cheerful needle/ Suddenly the door fell 



