HUGH MILLER 29 



Nor will he fail to note the exact and characteristic 

 point of difference in the two children, and how in each 

 the child was father of the man. So early in both was 

 the natural instinct of the future historian and the 

 geologist awakened. 



At a later period he seems rather to have become an 

 unruly lad, and to have proved too much for his rela- 

 tions to manage. He was in the stage when such boys 

 run away to sea or enlist, and his father's own calling 

 might, from its well-nigh hereditary nature, have been 

 thought to be the one most likely to be adopted. He 

 enjoyed a somewhat dangerous reputation through 

 carrying a knife and stabbing a companion in the thigh, 

 but these escapades may in later years have been 

 unconsciously heightened by remorse for wasted oppor- 

 tunities, and which in his case we have seen to amount 

 to little or nothing. But the circle of his own com- 

 panions was changing or breaking up, and it became 

 necessary to decide on the future. His mother, after 

 being a widow for well-nigh a dozen years, had married 

 again, and he determined on being a mason, an occu- 

 pation which he thought would, by his being employed 

 in labour at intermittent seasons, afford him plenty 

 leisure. Against this resolution both his uncles stoutly 

 protested, and were prepared to assist him to the 

 Northern university. * I had no wish,' he says, ' and no 

 peculiar fitness to be either lawyer or doctor \ and as 

 for the Church, that was too serious a direction to look 

 in for one's bread, unless one could necessarily regard 



