He was to experience constant fits of depression and exhaustion, which caused sleep-walking; and though this after a time passed away, it was yet in later years to recur with fatal effects. In his master he was fortunate. He was one who would fully have come up to Carlyle's standard of his own father, 'making a conscience of every stone he laid.' Unconsciously, also, the apprentice was laying the foundations of the educated sense of sight so essential to the mason, and which was to stand him in excellent service in later years of geological ramblings. But the life was a hard one, from the surroundings in which the trade of a north-country mason had to be carried on. Living in a small village, where the lack of steady employment was naturally often felt, he had to eke out a living by odd jobs in the country, building farm-steadings or outhouses, with but scanty shelter and in surroundings too often unfavourable to comfort or morality. His experience of the bothy-system thus acquired by personal hardship he was in later years to turn to account in his leaders in _The Witness_--'I have lived,' he says, 'in hovels that were invariably flooded in wet weather by the over-flowings of neighbouring swamps, and through whose roofs I could tell the hour at night, by marking from my bed the stars that were passing over the openings along the ridge.' He was now to feel the truth of his uncles' warnings in dissuading him from the occupation. They had pointed to a hovel on a laird's property, who had left it standing that at some future date it might be turned to profit when he should have a drove of swine, or when a 'squad' of masons would pass that way. The life which had been introduced by the large farm system had been criticised already by Burns, who in the jottings of his _Highland Tour_ had been struck by the superior intelligence of the Ayrshire cottar to the stolid boorishness of the agricultural labourer in the districts of the Lothians and the Merse. Recent legislation has largely mitigated the evils of the system which, even in a higher scale of comfort, has received a stern indictment in the eighth chapter of Dr. William Alexander's excellent work which we have before quoted, and to which, as the classic of the movement with which Miller's life is associated, we shall again refer. 'Better,' said Cobbett, who had studied it during a brief sojourn in the country, 'the fire-raisings of Kent than the bothy system of Scotland.'