SCENE IN THE HIGHLANDS. 255 



stripping off every fish from their hooks as the line is 

 drawn over it. This formidable animal is from six to 

 ten feet in length, and formed like the common 

 shark/ 



The letters on the Herring Fishery were fitted to 

 interest many to whom the poems of the journeyman 

 mason would be a sealed book. Whatever might be his 

 rhyming capabilities, the Cromarty mason was clearly a 

 man of sense and talent. The circle of his friends and 

 admirers continued, therefore, to widen. In character 

 of occasional correspondent, he contributed items of 

 news and occasional articles to the Inverness Courier. 

 These are admirably done, and in some of them we 

 detect impressions and opinions cherished by Miller 

 to the last. The following occurs in an article on 

 the departure of. two hundred emigrants from Cro- 

 marty for Canada: 'A few years ago we were led by 

 business into the central Highlands of the north. We 

 passed on a half-obliterated path through a succession 

 of those wild scenes of savage sterility and rude grand- 

 eur, which, if not peculiar to the Highlands of Scotland, 

 only occur in countries whose high destiny it is, not to 

 be conquered by a foreign enemy. They suggested to 

 us a series of pleasing reflections. Abrupt, craggy hills 

 separated from each other by deep gloomy ravines, 

 which seemed the rents and fissures of a shattered and 

 ruined planet, and which varied in colour, according to 

 their distance, from the faintest azure to the darkest 

 purple, filled our whole space of view from the fore- 

 ground to the horizon. Such, we thought, are the 

 barriers which, in defiance of the armies of Rome and of 

 England, maintained the spirit of freedom in this country 

 during the early ages of its history, and which, in 

 the present times, oppose an insurmountable wall of 



