even in this choice, for he knew that masons in the Highlands of Scotland did not work in the winter months, and in these he would betake himself to his beloved pen. For fifteen years he worked as a mason, earning his bread by steady, effective labour, but aware all the time of a power within him, a force of giant mould imprisoned beneath the mountain of adverse circumstance, which, he doubted not, would one day make itself known to the world. This vague prophecy in his heart, which surely was the voice of his genius speaking within him, was fulfilled. Sorcerers in the old time professed to show visions of the past and future in magic mirrors; but the true magical mirror is the mind of genius; and when Hugh Miller's contemporaries beheld, reflected in the mirror of his mind, lifted from the profound obscurity in which they had formerly slept and set in vivid clearness before the eyes of the world, the little town he loved, the Sutors, the bay, the hill, they felt that the one Cromarty man of all generations who had done this was possessed of genius. With this decision we rest content. The true greatness of Hugh Miller lay, however, in his moral qualities. Here we may give our enthusiasm the rein. There was a rare nobleness, a rare blending of magnanimity, rectitude and gentleness, in this man. His affections were at once tender and constant, and when you search the very deeps of his soul, you find in it no malice, no guile, no greed, nothing which can be called base or selfish. We are struck with admiration as we mark the high tones of his mind, his superiority to all vulgar ambitions. There has probably been some romancing about the peasant nobles of Scotland, but in Hugh Miller, the journeyman mason, and in his uncles James and Sandy, the one a saddler, the other a wood-cutter, we have three men who, so long as the mind is the standard of the man, will be classed with the finest type of gentleman. It is greatly to the honour of Scotland, and of the old evangelical religion of Scotland, that she produced such men. Hugh Miller's uncles performed for him a father's part, and he learned from them, not so much through formal instruction as by a certain contagion--to use the phrase in which the Londoners, a hundred years ago, in their inscription on Blackfriars Bridge, described with felicitous precision the manner of Pitt's influence on his contemporaries--that sensitive uprightness, that manly independence, and that love of nature, by which he was distinguished. The ambition of money-making, which as it were naturally and inevitably suggests itself to a youth of parts in an English village, never seems to have so much as presented itself to the mind of Hugh Miller. In cultivating the spiritual faculties of his soul, in adding province after province to the empire of his mind, lay at once the delight and the ambition of this young mechanic. He aspired to fame, but his conception of fame was pure and lofty.