HUGH MILLER 35 



erected, and he had been rated as a heritor for a sum 

 so considerable that the entire year's rental of the 

 dilapidated tenement was swallowed up, together with 

 most of his savings as a mason. He had come of 

 age when in the miserable hovel at Gairloch we have 

 described, and was now competent to deal with his 

 luckless property. Setting sail in the Leith smack 

 running between Cromarty and that port, he entered 

 the Firth of Forth four days after losing sight of the 

 Sutors. He saw with interest Dunottar Castle and the 

 Bass Rock chronicled in the well-known lines of his 

 friend, Dr. Longmuir of Aberdeen. Indeed the latter 

 had for him peculiar associations through one of 

 the Ross-shire worthies in the times of Charles n. 

 James Fraser of Brea ; for, when the sun set on the 

 upland farm on which he had been born, Miller knew 

 that it was time to collect his tools at the end of his 

 day's labour. In 1847, when he visited the rock on 

 the geological expedition which he has commemorated 

 by his paper on the structure of the Bass, his thoughts 

 again reverted to Fraser, and to two other captives from 

 his own district, Mackilligen of Alness and Hog of 

 Kiltearn. His uncle James had at an early period 

 introduced him to Burns and Fergusson, while from his 

 boyish days the old novel of Smollett, Humphrey Clinker, 

 had been no less familiar than from the pages of David 

 Copperfield we know it to have been to Dickens. It 

 was, therefore, with no small interest that he caught his 

 first view of Arthur Seat and the masts of the shipping 



