54 THE APPRENTICE. 



These Village Observers are absolutely authentic 

 documents of Miller's history at this time, and en- 

 able us to realize the circumstances of his life before 

 any tint of fancy, or association from the pursuits of 

 a subsequent period, had softened their harsher fea- 

 tures. In the three numbers there is not the remotest 

 allusion to his apprenticeship. This may be imputed 

 to the disagreeableness of the subject ; but it is some- 

 what remarkable that place is not found for a brief 

 description of those rare and beautiful birds discover- 

 ed by him in the quarry on the evening of his first day 

 of labour, and delineated with enthusiastic minuteness 

 in the Old Red Sandstone. The one was a goldfinch- 

 very uncommon in the highlands of Scotland with ' hood 

 of vermilion and wings inlaid with gold ; ' the other a 

 bird of the woodpecker tribe, ' variegated with light blue 

 and a greyish yellow.' Neither does Hugh, in capacity 

 of village observer, give us, in his March number for 

 1820, any hint of that ' exquisite pleasure ' which, as we 

 are told in the Old Red Sandstone, he derived from con- 

 templating the adjacent landscape when resting, on the 

 second day, from his toil at the hour of noon. ' All the 

 workmen,' he says in that book, ' rested at midday, and 

 I went to enjoy my half-hour alone on a mossy knoll 

 in the neighbouring wood, which commands through the 

 trees a wide prospect of the bay and the opposite shore. 

 There was not a wrinkle on the water, nor a cloud in the 

 sky, and the branches were as moveless in the calm as if 

 they had been traced on canvas. From a wooded pro- 

 montory that stretched half-way across the frith there 

 ascended a thin column of smoke. It rose straight as the 

 line of a plummet for more than a thousand yards, and 

 then, on reaching a thinner stratum of air, spread out 

 equally on every side, like the foliage of a stately tree. 



