M'Crie has done in his book what Carlyle, in his _Letters of Cromwell_, has for ever effected for the true presentation of the Protector. In the bookstalls of the city he would pick up some new additions to his shelf. At odd hours, too, he would hang about Castle Street in the hope of seeing Sir Walter Scott. The capital at this time, though sadly shorn of its old literary coteries in the days of Burns, still numbered such men as Jeffrey, Cockburn, Dugald Stewart, and Professor Wilson; and he did manage, one evening, to spend some hours with a cousin in Ambrose's, where the famous club used to hold their meetings in a room below. But none of these faces was he then destined to know in the flesh, and the 'pride of all Scotsmen' whom Carlyle met in the Edinburgh streets, 'worn with care, the joy all fled,' had passed away the next time when Miller visited the capital. Work, we have seen, was plentiful in the town. The great fire had swept Parliament Close and the High Street, carrying with it the steeple of the old Tron, and many of the lofty tenements that formed such a feature of Old Edinburgh. But he was feeling the first effects of the stone-cutters' disease, and his lungs, affected by the stone dust, threatened consumption. He states that few of his class reached the age of forty through the trouble, and not more than one in fifty ever came to forty-five. But circumstances fortunately enabled him at this critical juncture to leave work for a time. The house on the Coalhill had turned out better than was expected, and, with a clear balance of fifty pounds in his pocket, he could set sail for Cromarty, where, after a weary seven days' voyage through fog and mist, he was met on landing by his uncles. Not for ten years, and then under very different circumstances, was he again to see Edinburgh.