The parish school of Cromarty which Miller attended numbered about a hundred and twenty boys and girls. The windows of the building fronted the opening of the Cromarty Firth, recalling at least by 'the mystery of the ships' the Portland of Longfellow's own early days. The tax of twenty peats to the school from the Highland boatmen paid for every boat in the trade recalls the salary of the public hangman of Inverness and Aberdeen, and the dues often formed the subject of debate between the boys and the irate Gaels, who did not fail to retort the taunt of the hangman's perquisite. The schoolmaster was a worthy that might have sat for the figure of Jonathan Tawse in Dr. Alexander's _Johnny Gibb_, and was, though a fair scholar, rather inefficient as a disciplinarian and teacher. Yet it was his boast--one now, alas, in these days sadly becoming obsolete--that he sent forward more lads to the bursary competition at the Northern university than any other teacher, and his 'heavy class' of a few boys in Latin was increased by his persuading the willing Uncle James to set Miller to the _Rudiments_ in that time-honoured volume by Ruddiman, who had in his own days been a first bursar at Aberdeen. The teaching of Latin had been one of the props to education introduced by the Reformers, and so distinct had been the little note of pedantry, perhaps in this way fostered, that Smollett makes the barber in _Roderick Random_ quote Horace in the original, and Foote in a farce has made a valet insist on its possession as a shibboleth of nationality. We need but mention the favourite quotations in the ancient tongue by the Baron of Bradwardine and Dugald Dalgetty as a reminiscence of his own old days 'at the Marischal College'; while Miller also could remember an old cabinet-maker who carried for the sake of the big print a Latin New Testament to church. But no more with him than with Darwin could the linguistic faculty be stimulated. The _Rudiments_ he thought the dullest book he had ever seen, and though in after-life he regretted the lost opportunity that at five-and-twenty might have made him a scholar and thus have saved ten of the best working years of his life, it may be doubted if in his case the loss amounted to more than in the case of Macaulay, who affected to bewail his loss of mathematics. In their truest form, scholars, like naturalists, are born and not made, nor will any labour in the linguistic field yield much to the scientist. The poet Gray wisely lamented the loss of time in his own case through forced labour at mathematics, a remark not even yet fully appreciated in Scotland, where the system of general excellence--that system under which Johnson so happily remarked that, while each man got a bite, no one got a bellyful--has too long stunted the learning of the country and proved the bane alike of her schools and universities. 'As for Latin, I abominate it,' we find him writing from Cromarty in December 1838, in a