HUGH MILLER. 121 



among brother journeymen, or to render himself worthy of 

 the average wages of his craft, the ill-taught mechanic falls out 

 of regular employment, subsists precariously for a time on 

 occasional jobs, and either, forming idle habits, becomes a 

 vagabond tramper, or, getting into the toils of some rapacious 

 taskmaster, becomes an enslaved sweater. For one workman 

 injured by neglect of his school education, there are scores 

 ruined by neglect of fheir apprenticeship education. Three- 

 fourths of the distress of the country's mechanics (of course 

 not reckoning that of the unhappy class who have to compete 

 with machinery), and nine-tenths of their vagabondism, will 

 be found restricted to inferior workmen, who, like Hogarth's 

 "careless apprentice," neglected the opportunities of their 

 second term of education. The sagacious painter had a truer 

 insight into this matter than most of our modern educationists.' 

 Miller's first kindly act on becoming a journeyman was to 

 build a cottage for his Aunt Jenny, on a piece of ground he 

 had inherited from his father in Cromaity. The cottage still 

 stands a worthy monument of such an act In his correspon- 

 dence with William Ross, who was now in Edinburgh, he 

 enclosed from time to time a selection from his poems. These 

 poems, says Mr. Bayne, * are fluent and vivacious, but display 

 little original power or depth of melody.' In midsummer 1823, 

 he found work at Gairloch, on the west coast of Ross-shire. 

 He was now not yet twenty-one, and the different hovels he 

 lived in were damp and uncomfortable, and his food was of 

 the plainest, often oatmeal without milk. The winter of 1823 

 he spent as usual at Cromarty, but a small property at Leith 

 having been left to his mother, which had been a constant 

 source of annoyance ever since his father's death, he left in 

 the spring of 1824 to mvestigate the affair on the spot. He 



