56 THE APPRENTICE. 



wheelbarrows over a plank, or the raising of huge blocks 

 of stone out of a quarry. My hands were soon fretted 

 into large blisters, my breast became the seat of a dull, 

 oppressive pain, and I was much distressed after exertion 

 more than usually violent by an irregular motion of the 

 heart. My spirits were almost always miserably low ; 

 and I was so wrapped up in a wretched apathetic ab- 

 sence of mind, that I have wrought for whole hours 

 together with scarcely a thought of what I was doing 

 myself, and scarcely conscious of what others were doing 

 around me.' 



Both these narratives may be strictly consistent with 

 fact. In that case they afford a striking illustration of 

 Miller's own remark, that two varying descriptions may 

 be given by the same person of the same events, and 

 yet both be veracious. He said nothing, in the earlier 

 documents, of the rare birds, the beautiful landscape, 

 the rippled-marked stone, because it was not until after- 

 wards that he regarded them as of importance. He 

 mentally associated with his first years of labour feel- 

 ings which belonged to a later time. He was an ob- 

 server from infancy, and his observations gave him joy ; 

 his memory became stored with facts ; but not until he 

 studied geology did he apprehend that these facts had any 

 scientific value. When geology took possession of Miller, 

 the possession was complete. He thought, talked, wrote of 

 geology ; his leading articles, his discussions of political 

 and religious questions, were full of it. From the boyish 

 magazines he edited, it is absent ; from the poems which 

 he composed in boyhood and youth, it is absent ; in the 

 letters which he wrote to his favourite associates, of 

 which we have an uninterrupted series, beginning a 

 year or two later than the time at which we have arrived, 

 we look for it in vain ; and in the narrative composed 



