HUGH MILLER 27 



learning of the country and proved the bane alike of 

 her schools and universities. 'As for Latin, I abominate 

 it,' we find him writing from Cromarty in December 

 1838, in a letter now before us, 'and ever did since I 

 burnt my Rudiments' 



More congenial amusement he found in the exercise 

 of his story-telling faculty. When the master's back 

 was turned, the Sennachie, as the master called him, 

 would gather round him the other boys and narrate to 

 them the adventures of his uncle, the story of Gulliver, 

 and the shipwreck of Robinson Crusoe, or even the 

 mysteries of Mrs. Radcliffe. When the sixty volumes 

 of his father and the hundred and sixty of his uncles 

 had been consumed, he fell in with a collection of 

 essayists from Addison to Henry Mackenzie, the influ- 

 ence of which, along with Goldsmith's Citizen of the 

 World) remained to the last as a powerful impress upon 

 his prose style. But he was rapidly finding his national 

 and true school. The Hill of Cromarty, part of De 

 Beaumont's Ben-Nevis system, and the rich Liassic 

 deposit of Eathie, were his favourite haunts, and his 

 uncle Alexander, after his own work was done, would 

 spend with him many an hour in the ebb tide. To the 

 training thus acquired from this untaught naturalist he 

 owed much of his own close powers of observation, 

 which led, however, well-nigh to a fatal termination 

 through an adventurous visit to the Doo-cot caves, 

 from which he was rescued late at night during a high 

 tide. This formed the subject of his first copy of 



