HUGH MILLER 57 



through the appearance on the scene of a young lady 

 whom he was afterwards to make his wife. Sauntering 

 through the wood on the hill overlooking the Cromarty 

 Firth he met Miss Lydia Fraser, who was engaged in 

 reading 'an elaborate essay on Causation.' The reader 

 may remember with feelings, we hope, of contrition 

 for Mr. Lang's railway lyric on the fin de siecle students 

 of Miss Braddon and Gaboriau, and for the degenerate 

 tendencies of the age, the curiously fitting parallel in 

 which the geologist Buckland met in a Devonshire 

 coach, his future wife, Miss Morland, deep in a ponder- 

 ous and recently issued folio of Cuvier, into which even 

 he himself had not found time to dip ! Miller was ten 

 years the senior of his young friend, whose father had 

 been in business in Inverness, and whose mother had 

 retired to Cromarty to live in a retired way upon a small 

 annuity, added to by her daughter's private pupils. 

 As a girl Miss Fraser had been a boarder in the family 

 of George Thomson, whose Select Collection of Original 

 Scottish AirS) enriched by the hand of Burns with about 

 a hundred songs, forms an abiding monument of their 

 joint taste and judgment. The acquaintance ripened 

 into intimacy and an agreement that for three years 

 they were to make Scotland their home, when, should 

 nothing then turn up they were to emigrate and try 

 their fortune in America. But fortunately an opening 

 occurred which was to retain him at home for the work 

 he was so naturally fitted to perform. 



Cromarty had hitherto been without a bank. Now, 



