14 THE BOY. 



invested with interest in a biographic point of view. 

 It affords us a glimpse into the subtlest workings of 

 Hugh Miller's mind. We must, therefore, consider it 

 carefully. 



The appearance, to begin with, is to be classed 

 among the more easily explicable phenomena of optical 

 delusion. The child, from the day his mind began to 

 receive impressions of any kind, had been encompassed 

 with an atmosphere of superstition. In days of steam- 

 ships and telegraphs, sailors and fishermen continue a 

 superstitious race ; but it is only by the strongest effort 

 of imagination that we can realize the extent to which 

 the natural and the supernatural were confounded in 

 remote fishing towns like Cromarty at the commence- 

 ment of this century. Teach a child to look for ghosts, 

 and he will be sure to see them. Hugh had learned to 

 associate the idea of his father with a special manifest- 

 ation of the awful and the supernatural. Often, while 

 the embers were burning low on winter evenings, and 

 every inmate of the cottage listened in awe-struck silence, 

 had he hung upon the lips of ' Jack Grant the mate,' as 

 he told how his father had sailed from Peterhead beneath 

 a gloomy twilight ; how a woman and child who begged 

 a passage were taken on board; how the wind rose 

 and the snow-storm lashed the vessel ; how a dead-light 

 gleamed out on the cross trees ; how a ghostly woman, 

 with a child in her arms, flitted round the master at the 

 helm ; how, when dawn glimmered over the sea, the ship 

 struck and rolled over amid the breakers on ' the terrible 

 bar of Findhorn ; ' and how the corpse of the woman, 

 still clasping the babe in her arms, was floated out 

 through a hole in the side of the wreck. 



Turn now to the passage quoted. His father being 

 away at sea, the child is sent, as the dusk thickens, to 



