council was, on one occasion, clubbing together a penny each to pay a ninepenny postage in the complete absence of town funds. Into his life at this period a new vision was introduced through the appearance on the scene of a young lady whom he was afterwards to make his wife. Sauntering through the wood on the hill overlooking the Cromarty Firth he met Miss Lydia Fraser, who was engaged in reading 'an elaborate essay on Causation.' The reader may remember--with feelings, we hope, of contrition for Mr. Lang's railway lyric on the _fin de siècle_ students of Miss Braddon and Gaboriau, and for the degenerate tendencies of the age,--the curiously fitting parallel in which the geologist Buckland met in a Devonshire coach, his future wife, Miss Morland, deep in a ponderous and recently issued folio of Cuvier, into which even he himself had not found time to dip! Miller was ten years the senior of his young friend, whose father had been in business in Inverness, and whose mother had retired to Cromarty to live in a retired way upon a small annuity, added to by her daughter's private pupils. As a girl Miss Fraser had been a boarder in the family of George Thomson, whose _Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs_, enriched by the hand of Burns with about a hundred songs, forms an abiding monument of their joint taste and judgment. The acquaintance ripened into intimacy and an agreement that for three years they were to make Scotland their home, when, should nothing then turn up they were to emigrate and try their fortune in America. But fortunately an opening occurred which was to retain him at home for the work he was so naturally fitted to perform. Cromarty had hitherto been without a bank. Now, through the representation of local landowners and traders, the Commercial Bank of Scotland was induced to extend one of its branches to the town. The services of a local shipowner were secured for the post of agent, and Miller was offered the place of accountant. It was necessary, of course, that he should qualify himself for his new duties, and so he sailed to Leith to acquire his initiation at Linlithgow. He was now in his thirty-second year.