60 THE APPRENTICE. 



regard the ministers of the Church of Christ as taking pre- 

 cedence of all others in the intellectual aristocracy. They 

 have told him that if he will only return to his books, and 

 prepare for college, their home and their savings will be 

 at his command. They have tried to appeal to his pride 

 and desire for advancement. Uncle James has gone the 

 length of hinting with some bitterness that if he has 

 found books too hard for him, he may find labour harder 

 still, and may turn from the latter with the same incon- 

 stancy with which he turned from the former. But 

 Hugh, as James Wright knows and has said, is ' a lad 

 of his own will/ and his mind is made up. As for 

 his declinature of the clerical profession, he satisfies 

 both himself and Uncle James on that head, by the con- 

 sideration that he has no call to the sacred office. The 

 feeling of independence, strong in Hugh Miller as in 

 Robert Burns, rebels against the idea of his going to 

 college, dependent on the bounty of relatives. Strangely 

 enough, too, that passion for literature, whether in the form 

 of reading or of writing, which had marked him from 

 his childhood as the predestined author, drove him to the 

 quarry. The conception of a literary career founded 

 upon a complete University education, and commencing 

 with the instruments and furtherances which ages have 

 accumulated, had not dawned upon his mind. Literature 

 had been to him a coy maiden, radiant, fascinating, but 

 free and light-winged as a forest bird, and he shrank from 

 formal irreversible espousals. He has observed that 

 ' Cousin George/ a mason, though hard worked during 

 several months in the year, has the months of winter to 

 himself. This decides him in favour of the trade of 

 mason. In winter and early spring he will return to his 

 beloved Muse, to dally with her in a life-long courtship ; 

 or, if it is to end in marriage, for the thought of rising 



