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courses of lectures in turn, on the education of males, and the duties of husbands, fathers, and sons? We have had numerous treatises and strictures upon corsets: by all means, then, let us see if we cannot utter something profitable respecting black conical tiles and bald heads, swallow-tails and tight cravats (which some style "chokers"), and numerous other weak points in the attire of our male friends.

It seems to me to be too much the fashion to assume that "females," as the "males" denominate us, have a monopoly of absurdity in fashion and frivolity in pursuits, and that they only need educating. It must, however, be admitted that these wonderfully candid, and sometimes surgar-candied, friends of ours are extremely, complimentary while they are pointing out our weaknesses. They even tell us that they love our weaknesses-that they admire us for our timidity-and take a pride in us because of the charmingness of our very imperfections. And yet they would have us "improved," modelled after their fashion, and educated, dressed, and mannered to suit the views of the superior sex.

Of course they are superior, and they lecture us accordingly. It is a gross mistake to suppose that, even in that delightful state called the matrimonial, the lecturer is invariably of the "gentle" sex. Are there not male Caudles as well as female? Yes, and male Caudles who will have the last word. When they give us the benefit of their lectures, we cannot escape by running off to the nearest club or tavern, and sit soaking there half the night. With all our amiable weaknesses and want of proper education, it is certainly not we who maintain the public-houses of England-who drink the sixty millions worth of brandy, beer, and stout yearly-there spending the children's money-there wasting the means of domestic comfort and well-being.

It is certainly full time that the " women of England" set on foot some agitation for the improvement of the male sex. That they stand in need of better training, there are cases enough weekly occurring in the courts of law and in the police courts to prove. Indeed, there seems to be at present a very large number of cowardly brutes abroad in society, who habitually beat and abuse their unfortunate wives, simply because they happen to have stronger muscles and bigger fists. We have been writing books for the "mothers of England," but why should the "fathers of England" be neglected, and allowed to grow up such savages? We have had regard for the

daughters of England," why not equally for the "sons ?" The "wives of England" have also been lectured, but what of the "husbands ?" Is it not becoming daily more evident that their proper discipline, in sobriety, in manners, and in true courage, has been shamefully neglected.

These gentlemen lecturers have been telling us that we mould the heart of England, form its manners, educate its feelings, and refine its intelligence. But they tell us in the same breath that we are the "weaker sex," and accordingly they reserve to themselves the whole power of making the laws, which are invariably made with a view to their own sex interests. It is true, we have great power in our own sphere-which is home; but even there it is but a divided government. We are the inferior power, and the "weaker vessel." Does the superior being, the lord and master, so invariably govern in a spirit of justice, mercy, and love, that he can assume to lecture us as a sex upon the nuisance of that authority, which, after all, is but a reflex of his own? Do not the vast number of drinking-houses, crowded night after night with these superior personages, prove that there is something radically wrong at the seat of government. Can the wife be responsible to her children for that bad example? Can her lessons of frugality, sobriety, and regularity neutralise the influence which that lesson on

the part of the head of the household is certain to exercise upon its juvenile members?

But we are very frivolous and irrational, it is alleged; and some even go so far as to say that they admire us because of our very irrationality. I am sorry to say, that we cannot return the compliment. That there are many egregious fools amongst the superior sex-many of them densely ignorant-must be admitted; but we certainly find them anything but charming. Of all intolerable persons, the most so are those who pride themselves upon their being of the superior sex, immense boobies though they be. It is a notorious fact, too, that these men invariably rule us with a rod of iron, and we of course yield to the powers that be.

I wish somebody would write a book about the education of men, so that they should be Men, and not bad imitations of the silliest women. That class of youths who ape the feminine, is sadly on the increase in these days, youths that dawdle, lounge, cultivate their locks, and use Houbignant's scents. They seem to have no pursuit, except to kill time, and to flutter about women as weak as themselves. Follies such as these are not confined to our sex alone. There are many pairs of fools in the world, equally mated, but not equally yoked; for when once within the traces, the man, who is generally the biggest fool of the two, is the leader, and the woman has only to follow.

You

No, my lords and gentlemen, in order to have a better sort of women, we must have a better sort of men. are the leaders, the governors, the critics, and the educators, of the world. Do not think to get rid of your responsibility by alleging that we are the educators of the heart, mind, and conscience of the nation; and in the same voice insisting that we are weak, frivolous, and must in all things be subject to you. Show us a fitting example. Spend your evenings at home. Let your children see you in their midst, to influence them for good. Use your power lovingly and tenderly. Thus will you be honoured and beloved; thus will your wives regard you as their crown of glory-their chief joy and source of happiness; and thus will your children rise up to honour and prosperity in the world, and your old age be made full of blessings.

THE OTHER SIDE.

THERE are always two sides to a question, though sometimes there are more. It often happens, however, that only one side is presented to us, or we choose to look at that side only, having a bias, or interest, or prejudice, so to regard it. So long as we do that, and shut out all opposing evidence, we have no difficulty in making up our minds. The thing is perfectly clear, there can be no doubt about it.

But turn the question round-view it from another point-and lo! the aspect it assumes is altogether different. You view a valley from the bottom and from the top, and the scene is altogether different, and yet it is the same valley. Or you survey a mountain from the base and from the summit, and the pictures are entirely at variance, yet both are true, as seen from the point of vision which is assumed.

So long as people confine themselves to viewing a question from one side, a great deal of trouble is saved. Examination of conflicting evidence, exercise of judgment, scrutinizing of motions, and analysis of arguments-all that is avoided. But take your stand at another side of the question, and you find it presents entirely new aspects. Then you have to review your former judgment, to recognise the force of new arguments, and perhaps to give up many of your former conclusions.

A master will view a question of strikes in another and

altogether different light from an operative. The one sees it from his stand-point as an employer: the other from his stand-point as a person employed. And the conclusions arrived at will be altogether different.

So a mistress will take one view of her household grievances, and her servant, if you could see the same matters from her point of view, will take an altogether different estimate, and come to an entirely contrary conclusion. There are two interests in domestic service as in factory labour; and the view which you take of them will depend mainly upon the point from which you look at

them.

Hear a free-trader or a peace-advocate discussing his favourite questions, and if you can take the same standpoint with them, you will come to the same conclusion. But hear the other side-take up another point of sightnow look, and lo! you will find the whole question has changed its aspect.

In all political questions it is the same; and when you have laid your mind fairly open to evidence, and listened unprejudicedly to facts and arguments, you cannot help saying, what is so often said, Well, there is a great deal of truth on both sides."

While the practice of shutting out all sides of a question, save one, tends to make men prejudiced, bigoted, and intolerant, the opposite practice of looking at and considering all the sides of a question, tends to make men sceptical, indifferent, and neutral, even as regards great questions. With all their faults, the men of one predominant idea, got from looking intently on one side of a question, are the men who have accomplished the great changes of the world. While others are turning the question round, and looking at it in all ways, they proceed to act; and, as the mass of mankind have a very limited vision, they are always more disposed to follow the men of the one strong ruling idea, than to wait until the men of many ideas-the philosophers-have made up their minds. Thus, all revolutions-all great social, political, and religious changes, have been accomplished by men of one idea-men who have, from a particular point of view, gazed at a question until it has possessed them as with a passion, and influenced their whole life and labours.

Yet it is always well to look to the other side, for there is truth there as well as here. To know that there is that other side, and to provide accordingly, will enable many grievous blunders to be avoided, and many serious, it may be fatal mischiefs, to be prevented. The other side may be weaker, but not the less true on that account. And the weak side often becomes the strong one in the end. Therefore, look to the other side, and do justice.

93 66

A SEA-CORONER WANTED.

The Blue Book of the Admiralty Register of Wrecks for the year 1852 has just been published. In running the eye down the column of casualties, we light upon 12 lives lost, 15 lost, 36 lost, 45 lost, 75 lost, 100 lost, "all lost," all drowned." Could it be credited, were it not for the official accounts, with the authority for each case appended, that 1,115 wrecks, with a loss of 920 lives, occurred on the coasts, and within the seas of the United Kingdom, in the single year of 1852? Yet so it is. Of this number 533 were total wrecks, the remainder stranded and damaged so as to require to discharge cargo. From the summary attached to the register we learn that the casualties in each month were as follow: January, 126; February, 77; March, 32; April, 44; May, 41; June, 29; July, 18; August, 42; September, 85; October, 164; November, 189; December, 268; total, 1,115. Of these 464 occurred on the east coast of Great Britain, 158 on the south coast, and 235 on the west coast. 128 wrecks strewed the coasts of Ireland, 5 were cast on shore

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at Scilly, 9 at the Channel Islands, 18 on the Orkneys and Shetland, and 18 at the Isle of Man; the remaining 80 occurred in the surrounding seas. The gales of January caused 126 casualties, as shown above; they prevailed during the whole month and the early part of February; the spring, summer, and autumn were moderate, but on the 26th October an easterly gale began, that in six days strewed the coast with 102 wrecks. Strong breezes and a short lull of moderate weather were followed by gales of ordinary force at this period of the year, but on the 24th December a heavy storm from the south-west burst over the country, and continued to the end of the year with such violence that, by the 29th, there was scarcely a vessel in the neighbourhood of the British Islands left at sea; some had found safety by running into port, while of others the returns show a list of 183 casualties, of which 102 were totally wrecked, making a daily average of 30 wrecks during this awful and destructive gale. The whole loss of life during the year, as far as has been ascertained, amounts to 920. Of these, 100 were lost in the Amazon, destroyed by fire on the 4th January, at about ninety miles from the Land's End; 13 in the Columbus, wrecked on the 6th January, near the Hook Lighthouse, Waterford, owing to the neglect of the Dunmore pilots; 12 in the John Toole, wrecked January 27, on the Arran Isles, near Galway; 15 in the Amy, wrecked March 23, at the Seven Heads, near Kinsale; 75 in the Mobile, wrecked September 29, on the Arklow banks; 10 in the Ernesto, wrecked October 27, near Boscastle, Cornwall; 15 in the Minerva, wrecked November 11, near the Bar of Drogheda; 15 in the Ocean Queen, wrecked December 26, at Wembury, near the Plymouth Mewstone; 45 in the Louise Emile, wrecked December 28, at Dungeness; 15 in the Haggerston iron-screw collier, lost in the gale of December 27, off Filey; 36 in the Lily, stranded December 28, in the Sound of the Isle of Man, when her cargo ignited and she blew up; 13 in the Alcibiades, wrecked December 28, in Ballyteigne Bay, Wexford; and 10 in the Broad Oak, wrecked December 29, in Dunlogh Bay, Skibbereen; the remainder were lost in sinaller numbers on the coast, or in vessels that foundered in the adjoining seas; making in all 920. Now, if a simple railway accident had occurred, and a single stoker had lost his life, a coroner's inquest would have been held, the whole details would have been carefully inquired into, and published in every newspaper in the United Kingdom, and, if any misconduct or neglect could have been found on the part of the railway company or their officials, a heavy fine would have been imposed. How different is the case of losses by shipwreck. Is not a sailor's life as valuable as that of a stoker? Why, then, such a difference? Are 920 seafaring men to perish, and many of them, as we see by the register, from neglect, or other causes within control, and no notice to be taken of them? We must have a sea-coroner; we have before advocated such an appointment in the pages of this journal, and we repeat our conviction that that would be one of the most effectual means of diminishing the number of shipwrecks.-From the Life-Boat Journal.

The Hood Memorial.

We have great pleasure in announcing that the "Hood Memorial," erected at Kensal Green Cemetery, will be uncovered for public inspection at three o'clock on Tuesday, May 23rd inst.-the anniversary of the poet's birth. We hope to be there to witness it, and that many subscribers to the memorial may be induced to pay a visit on the interesting occasion. The full list of subscribers, and description of the monument, will be published within a week or two.

Printed by Cox (Brothers) & WYMAN, 74-75, Great Queen Street, London; and published by CHARLES Cook, at the Office of the Journal, 3, Raquet Court, Fleet Street.

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No. 265.]

SATURDAY, MAY 27, 1854.

"BETTER IS" NOT "AN ENEMY TO GOOD."

A WORD TO OUR READER.

MEASURES have been adopted to impart increased
animation and vigour to this Journal, and indeed to give
to all departments of it, grave or gay, a still higher
degree of efficiency and completeness. A yet richer and
more varied spring of materials will be disposed with
strict method. In this view, not only the ablest literary
services have been secured, but the system by which we
may best avail ourselves of the great diversity of talents
and "shoot" them into one texture of many tints, has
been carefully and carnestly considered. Even without
certain minor changes which, of course, will be sufficiently
ostensible, and which will be introduced later,-without
these, and without at all waiting for them, we trust that
our readers will very soon perceive, in the points of
intrinsic amusement and pleasantness and value, the
effects of our anxiety to disprove, in this instance, at
least, the witty French proverb that "Better is the enemy
of Good." It is our ambition and our purpose to store these
pages still more profusely with all that makes the hour of
wise and well-chosen leisure compensate for the hours of
actual world-battling, refresh as with a bath the jaded
faculties, or nerve again the anxious and harassed mind.
It will be our task in the Journal to furnish to every
reader field and free warren and means to pursue for
himself what experience shows to be the most exquisite
as well as the most ennobling of the attainable pleasures of
instructed and civilised men,-pleasures of which the poor
can, in our day, partake as rightfully as the rich, and
which nevertheless have ever been preferable and preferred
in the eyes of wealth itself to all the others at its large
command; the only pleasures, after all, in which time is
gained, not lost; the only pleasures in which the powers
we all need, whatever be our calling, are strengthened,
elevated, and enlarged, instead of being warped or ener-
vated or debased.

Such journals as ours have a great mission, no doubt; but we fear that this mission is often austerely, rather than accurately, conceived. It cannot, for instance, be any business of theirs to crush the exhausted day by an evening of intricate and heavy disquisitions, or to disgust with reading and study those to whom reading and study might have proved of incalculable gain; those, we say, to whom such appliances, even when considered merely as means of recreation and pleasure, are in a peculiar degree

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precious,-being to all indeed the best and least perishable, but to them almost the only sources procurable of intellectual or refined enjoyment. But "it skills not arguing or disserting on so plain a matter; it will be enough to reduce the right principle to practice in our own pages.

We take the opportunity which this notice affords of saving time and of speaking to many at once, to beg our contributors, scattered in various places, to remember that they will not a little aid us by rendering their articles brief. There is a great art in this. It can never be done to the right degree without taking immense pains, nor is it ever successfully done without imparting incredible energy, effect, and life to the production thus condensed. "Your sermon," said a great critic to a great preacher (both were eloquent men),

was very

fine;
but had it been of only half the length, it would
have produced twice the impression." "You are quite
right," was the reply; "but the fact is, I received but
sudden notice to preach, and therefore I had not the
time to make my sermon short."

So with tales, essays, sketches, travels, biographies, character-portraits, hints of practical wisdom in common life, and scientific explanations (these last, however, may be fuller, as point, and liveliness, and amusement must be sacrificed to the most perfect clearness, and the expounder must make himself understood, however tedious he may thus happen to become); but with the great mass, we repeat, of the contributions to a periodical like ours, it is the same as with the discourse of the orator to whom we have alluded.

But, besides what each article will gain, we have it is this-variety another reason for inculcating brevity; of matter (and variety we will take care to have) is of course entirely incompatible with prolixity of writing.

It is a common remark, that learned people are often found, in practical life, below that level on which they had been expected to move; and that brilliant college celebrities, when they enter the world, sometimes appear strangely ignorant of things both necessary to acquire and easy to master,-knowing nothing, as it is said, and fit for nothing. It is not that they have failed to profit by the studies they have made, but that there are studies which they have not made at all.

Therefore, while professedly attending to the amusement of our readers, we will also supply them in a popular form with that very "course" elsewhère omitted,-a course of

"Common Things." There are few kinds of knowledge that are agreeable, and still fewer kinds that are useful, or convenient, or creditable, in the various stations and endless vicissitudes of this vast social labyrinth,-few, indeed, of these various departments of desirable information which will not find their place and their time in our quiet pages. We shall be anxious to promote both the loftier aims of the aspiring student and the plain, downright bread-winning ability of a less ambitious and more numerous class of readers. But "man lives not by bread alone;" and to speak with humour to the good-humoured, with courage-breathing thoughts to the desponding; to beguile a weary hour, to cheer a weary heart, to nerve and restore the doubting or the downcast mind, and to add to the best resources of home-recreation,-these objects enter legitimately, and they enter largely, into the scope of our Journal.

HUGH MILLER.

1. THE YOUTH.

MEN may learn much from each other's lives-especially from good men's lives. Men who live in our daily sight, as well as men who have lived before us, and handed down examples for us in the lives of others formed after their own model, are the most valuable practical teachers. For it is not mere literature that makes men-it is real, carnest, practical life, the life and example of the home, and the daily practical life of the people about us. This it is which mainly moulds our nature, which enables us to work out our own education, and build up our own character.

Hugh Miller has very strikingly worked out this idea in his admirable autobiography just published, entitled My Schools and Schoolmasters. It is extremely interesting, even fascinating, as a book; but it is more than an ordinary book-it might almost be called an institution. It is the history of the formation of a truly noble and independent character in the humblest condition of life-the condition in which a large mass of the people of this country are born and brought up; and it teaches to all, but especially to poor men, what it is in the power of each to accomplish for himself. The life of Hugh Miller is full of lessons of self-help and self-respect, and shows the efficacy of these in working out for a man an honourable competence and a solid reputation. It may not be that every man has the thew and sinew, the large brain and heart, of a Hugh Miller-for there is much in what we may call the breed of a man, the defect of which no mere educational advantages can supply; but every man can at least do much, by the help of such examples as his, to elevate himself and build up his moral and intellectual character on a solid foundation.

We have spoken of the breed of a man. In Hugh Miller we have an embodiment of that most vigorous and energetic element in our nation's life-the Norwegian and Danish. In the times of long, long ago, these daring and desperate northern pirates swarmed along our castern coasts. In England they were resisted by force of armsfor the prize of England's crown was a rich one; and by dint of numbers, valour, and bravery, they made good their footing in England, and even governed the eastern part of it by their own kings until the time of Alfred the Great. And to this day the Danish element amongst the population of the east and north-cast of England is by far the prevailing one. But in Scotland it was different.

They never reigned there; but they settled and planted all the eastern coasts. The land was poor and thinly peopled; and the Scottish kings and chiefs were too weak

generally too much occupied by intestine broils-to molest or dispossess them. Then these Danes and Norwegians led a sea-faring life, were sailors and fishermen, which the native Scots were not. So they settled down in all the bays and bights along the coast of Scotland, and took entire possession of the Orkneys, Shetland, and Western Isles, the Shetlands having been held by the crown of Denmark down to a comparatively recent period. They never amalgamated with the Scotch Highlanders; and to this day they speak a different language, and follow different pursuits. The Highlander was a hunter, a herdsman, a warrior, and fished in the fresh waters only. The descendants of the Norwegians, or the Lowlanders, as they came to be called, followed the sea, fished in salt waters, cultivated the soil, and engaged in trade and commerce. Hence the marked difference between the population of the town of Cromarty, where Hugh Miller was born in 1802, and the population only a few miles inland; the townspeople speaking Lowland Scotch, and dependant for their subsistence mainly on the sea, the others speaking Gaelic, and living solely on the land.

These Norwegian colonists of Cromarty held in their blood the very same piratical propensities which characterised their forefathers who followed the Vikings. Hugh Miller first saw the light in a long low-built house, built by his great-grandfather, John Fedders, "one of the last of the buccaneers;" this cottage having been built, as Hugh Miller himself says he has every reason to believe, with "Spanish gold." All his ancestors were sailors and scafaring men; when boys they had taken to the water as naturally as ducklings. Traditions of adventures by sea were rife in the family. Of his grand-uncles, one had sailed round the world with Anson, had assisted in burning Paeta, and in boarding the Manilla galleon; another, a handsome and powerful man, perished at sea in a storm; and his grandfather was dashed overboard by the jibboom of his little vessel when entering the Cromarty Firth, and never rose again. The son of this last, Hugh Miller's father, was sent into the country by his mother to work upon a farm, thus to rescue him, if possible, from the hereditary fate of the family. But it was of no use. The propensity for the salt water, the very instinct of the breed, was too powerful within him. He left the farm, went to sea, became a man-of-war's man, was in the battle with the Dutch off the Dogger Bank, sailed all over the world, then took "French leave" of the royal navy, returned to Cromarty with money enough to buy a sloop and engage in trade on his own account. But this vessel was one stormy night knocked to pieces on the bar of Findhorn, the master and his men escaping with difficulty; then another vessel was fitted out by him, by the help of his friends, and in this he was trading from place to place when Hugh Miller was born.

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What a vivid picture of sea-life, as seen from the shore at least, do we obtain from the early chapters of Miller's life. "I retain," says he, a vivid recollection of the joy which used to light up the household on my father's arrival, and how I learned to distinguish for myself his sloop when in the offing, by the two slim stripes of white that ran along her sides, and her two square topsails." But a terrible calamity-though an ordinary one in sea life-suddenly plunged the sailor's family in grief; and he, too, was gathered to the same grave in which so many of his ancestors lay-the deep ocean. A terrible storm overtook his vessel near Peterhead; numbers of ships were lost along the coast; vessel after vessel came

ashore, and the beach was strewn with wrecks and dead bodies, but no remnant of either the ship or bodies of Miller and his crew was ever cast up. It was supposed that the little sloop, heavily laden, and labouring in a mountainous sea, must have started a plank and foundered. Hugh Miller was but a child at the time, having only completed his fifth year. The following remarkable " appearance," very much in Mrs. Crowe's way, made a strong impression upon him at the time. The house-door had blown open, in the grey of evening, and the boy was sent by his mother to shut it,

Day had not wholly disappeared, but it was fast posting on to night, and a grey haze spread a neutral tint of dimness over every more distant object, but left the nearer ones comparatively distinct, when I saw at the open door, within less than a yard of my breast, as plainly as ever I saw anything, a dissevered hand and arm stretched towards me. Hand and arm were apparently those of a female: they bore a livid and sodden appearance; and directly fronting me, where the body ought to have been, there was only blank, transparent space, through which I could see the dim forms of the objects beyond. I was fearfully startled, and ran shrieking to my mother, telling what I had seen; and the house-girl, whom she next sent to shut the door, apparently affected by my terror, also returned frightened, and said that she, too, had seen the woman's hand; which, however, did not seem to be the case. And finally, my mother going to the door, saw nothing, though she appeared much impressed by the extremeness of my terror, and the minuteness of my description. I communicate the story as it lies fixed in my memory, without attempting to explain it its coincidence with the probable time of my father's death, seems at least curious."

The little boy longed for his father's return, and continued to gaze across the deep, watching for the sloop with its two stripes of white along the sides. Every morning he went wandering about the little harbour, to examine the vessels which had come in during the night; and he continued to look out across the Moray Forth long after anybody else had ceased to hope. But months and years passed, and the white stripes and square topsails of his father's sloop he never saw again. The boy was the son of a sailor's widow, and so grew up, in sight of the sea, and with the same love of it that characterised his father. But he was sent to school; first to a dame school, where he learnt his letters; worked his way through the Catechism, the Proverbs, and the New Testament; and then emerged into the golden region of Sinbad the Sailor, Jack the Giant Killer, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin and the wonderful Lamp. Other books followed-The Pilgrim's Progress, Cook's and Anson's voyages, and Blind Harry the Rhymer's History of Wallace; which first awoke within him a strong feeling of Scottish patriotism. And thus his childhood grew, on proper childlike nourishment. His uncles were men of solid sense and sound judgment, thongh uncultured by education. One was a local antiquary, by trade a working harness-maker; the other was of a strong religious turn: he was a working cartwright, and in early life had been a sailor, engaged in nearly all Nelson's famous battles. The examples and the conversation of these men were for the growing boy worth any quantity of school primers: he learnt from them far more than mere books could teach him.

But his school education was not neglected either. From the dame's school he was transferred to the town's grammar-school, where, amidst about one hundred and fifty other boys and girls, he received his real school education. But it did not amount to much. There, however, the boy learnt life-to hold his own-to try his powers with other boys-physically and morally, as well as scholastically. The school brought out the stuff

that was in him in many ways, but the mere booklearning was about the least part of the instruction.

The school-house looked out on the beach, fronting the opening of the Frith, and not a boat or a ship could pass in or out of the harbour of Cromarty without the boys seeing it. They knew the rig of every craft, and could draw them on the slate. Boats unloaded their glittering cargoes on the beach, where the process of gutting afterwards went busily on; and to add to the bustle, there was a large killing-place for pigs not thirty yards from the school door, "where from eighty to a hundred pigs used sometimes to die for the general good in a single day; and it was a great matter to hear, at occasional intervals, the roar of death rising high over the general murmur within, or to be told by some comrade, returned from his five minutes leave of absence, that a hero of a pig had taken three blows of a hatchet ere it fell, and that even after its subjection to the sticking process, it had got hold of Jock Keddie's hand in its mouth, and almost smashed his thumb." Certainly it is not in every grammar-school that such lessons as these are taught.

Miller was put to Latin, but made little progress in it -his master had no method, and the boy was too fond of telling stories to his schoolfellows in school hours to make much progress. Cock-fighting was a school practice in those days, the master having a perquisite of twopence for every cock that was entered by the boys on the days of the yearly fight. But Miller had no love for this sport, although he paid his entry money with the rest. In the meantime his miscellaneous reading extended, and he gathered pickings of odd knowledge from all sorts of odd quarters, from workmen, carpenters, fishermen and sailors, old women, and above all, from the old boulders strewed along the shores of the Cromarty Frith. With a big hammer which had belonged to his great grandfather, John Feddes, the buccaneer, the boy went about chipping the stones, and thus early accumulating specimens of mica, porphyry, garnet, and such like, exhibiting them to his uncle Alexander, and other admiring relations. Often, too, he had a day in woods to visit his uncle, when working as a sawyer-his trade of cartwright having failed. And there, too, the boy's attention was excited by the peculiar geological curiosities which lay in his way. While searching among the stones and rocks on the beach, he was sometimes asked, in humble irony, by the farm servants who came to load their carts with sea-weed, whether he " was gettin' siller in the stanes," but was so unlucky as never to be able to answer their question in the affirmative. Uncle Sandy seems to have been a close observer of nature, and in his humble way had his theories of ancient sea-beaches, the flood, and the formation of the world, which he duly imparted to the wondering youth. Together they explored caves, roamed the beach for crabs and lobsters, whose habits Uncle Sandy could well describe; he also knew all about moths and butterflies, spiders, and bees-in short, was a born natural history man, so that the boy regarded him in the light of a professor, and, doubtless, thus early obtained from him the bias toward his future studies.

There was the usual number of hair-breadth escapes in Miller's boy-life. One of them, when he and a companion had got cooped up in a sea cave, and could not return because of the tide, reminds us of the exciting scene described in Scott's Antiquary, there were schoolboy tricks, and schoolboy rambles, mischief-making in companionship with other boys, of whom he was often the leader. Left very much to himself, he was becoming a big, wild, insubordinate boy; and it became obvious that the time was now come when Hugh Miller must enter that worldwide school in which toil and hardship are the severe but noble masters. After a severe fight and wrestling match with his schoolmaster, he left school, avenging himself

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