Before leaving Cromarty he had been engaged upon his _Scenes and Legends_ of the traditional history of the country, and on his forwarding his manuscript to Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, to whom it is dedicated, he was invited by the hospitable baronet to meet Mr. Adam Black the publisher, whose long retention of the copyright of the Waverley Novels has shed distinction on the firm of which he was the head. By him very generous terms were offered, and Miller by his venture realised £60 over his second book, which still seems to enjoy in its thirteenth edition no slight share of popularity. He was even pressed by Sir Thomas to make his own house at Grange his residence while in the south, but, Linlithgow having been already fixed upon he took his passage in the fly-boat running on the canal between Edinburgh and Glasgow and soon 'reached the fine old burgh as the brief winter day was coming to a close, and was seated next morning at my desk, not a hundred yards from the spot on which Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh had taken his stand when he shot the Good Regent.' At first he was rather diffident of his ability for the work, the swiftness of mechanical summation never to the end coming to him perfectly natural; though, in the course of a brief two months' absence from Cromarty, he was able to join the bank with such a working acquaintance with the details of the business that, when the policy of Sir Robert Peel threatened an attack upon the circulation of the one-pound note, he was competent to publish a series of articles, _Words of Warning to the People of Scotland_, in which he defended the cash credit system of Scottish banking. This had before been fully expounded by Hume and Scott, and Miller could show its peculiar ability for enabling men to 'coin their characters should they be good ones, even should houses, ships, and furniture be wanting.' In the years to come his experience enabled him to write his own business and commercial leaders in his paper, but as yet his income did not exceed one hundred pounds, and he willingly joined in the continuation of Wilson's _Tales of the Borders_. This work has retained its popularity, though probably few are aware of the complexity of the authorship. As edited by Leighton, it preserves the names of several writers who occupy a more or less humble niche among the minor singers of Scotland, and in the list of contributors, along with Miller, to the work are found the two Bethunes, Alexander and John. He wrote for the _Tales_ a good deal of rather poorly remunerated work, and his papers on Burns and Fergusson afford a not unpleasing attempt to weave the lives of the two poets into an imaginative narrative. On their appearance, the papers were quoted as original reminiscences, though a more discriminating criticism could not have failed to detect their real nature. Miller possessed the logical and personal element too strong to merge his own individuality successfully in the characters of others.