IN CROMARTY AGAIN. 79 



mankind by a thick and gloomy wood, while the tower 

 of Fairburn,* and the blue hills behind it, formed the 

 distant landscape. Not a cloud rose upon the sky, 

 not a salmon glided beneath me in the river, nor a 

 leaf shook upon the alders that o'erhung the stream, 

 but raised some poetic emotion in my breast/ 



It was late in the year when he returned to Cromarty. 

 Nearly a month of winter had passed. Ross was now 

 residing in the cottage of his parents on the northern 

 side of Cromarty Frith, and Miller lacked the stimulus 

 of his literary sympathy. ' What remained of the season,' 

 he wrote to Baird, ' together with the greater part of the 

 ensuing spring, was spent in profitless indolence. I 

 neither wrote verses nor drew pictures, but wandered 

 during the day through the fields and woods, and among 

 the rocks of the hill of Cromarty ; and my evenings 

 were commonly spent either in the workshop of my uncle 

 James, where a few of the more intelligent mechanics of 

 the place generally met, or in the company of a new 

 acquaintance/ This was the helpless cripple, described 

 in the Schools and Schoolmasters as ' poor lame Dame,' 

 who, with his old mother, occupied ' a damp under- 

 ground room/ Miller formed a friendship with the 

 suffering boy, and took delight in alleviating the tedium 

 of his lingering illness. 



* The accompanying drawing was executed by Miller a few years 

 subsequently to the time when he worked in the vicinity of the old 

 tower of Fairburn. 



