HUGH MILLER. 1 2 5 



and the letters in the newspapers and the pamphlet he pub- 

 lished were successful in averting the possibility of this proposal 

 becoming a reality. 



While working in the churchyard at his occupation of stone- 

 cutting, he had occasional visitors. His own minister would 

 come and chat with him for hours together, and he also saw 

 Sir Thomas Dick Lauder and Professor Pillans while thus 

 engaged. In the summer of 1831 he first saw his future wife, 

 Miss Lydia Mackenzie Fraser. Talking with two ladies beside 

 a sun-dial in his uncle's garden, she ' came hurriedly tripping 

 down the garden walk' and joined them. She was in her nine- 

 teenth year at the time, and, as described by Miller, ' she was 

 very pretty, with a light petite figure, waxen clearness of com- 

 plexion, making her look more like a fair child than a grown 

 woman.' 



The growth of the intimacy with Miss Fraser is thus plea- 

 santly told in Miller's autobiography : — 



' Only a few evenings after, I met the same young lady, in 

 circumstances of which the writer of a tale might have made 

 a little more. I was sauntering, just as the sun was sinking, 

 along one of my favourite walks on the hill — a tree-skirted 

 glade, now looking out through the openings on the ever-fresh 

 beauties of the Cromarty Firth, with its promontories, and bays, 

 and long lines of winding shore, and anon marking how redly 

 the slant light fell through interstitial gaps on pale lichened 

 trunks and huge boughs, in the deeper recesses of the wood, 

 when I found myself unexpectedly in the presence of the young 

 lady of the previous evening. She was sauntering through the 

 wood as leisurely as myself, now and then dipping into a 

 rather bulky volume which she carried, that had not in the 

 least the look of a novel, and which, as I subsequently ascer- 



