The year 1856 was one remarkable for garotte robberies. This awakened in the overtaxed brain of Miller a fear for his museum of geological specimens which he had housed for himself at Shrub Mount, Portobello. The last four years of his life he had spent there, and often he would leave the house and return late in the evening after hours of investigation of the coast line and geological features of Leith and the surrounding country. He knew his Edinburgh thoroughly; some of his happiest papers are to be read in his _Edinburgh and its Neighbourhood_; and it was after one of these excursions that Sir Archibald Geikie had seen him, as he describes in the reminiscence to be found in the last pages of this work. The fear of burglars had taken hold firmly of his imagination, and he resumed the habit of bearing fire-arms which he had begun at Cromarty when carrying the money of the bank between that town and Tain. The inflammation of the lungs in his early days as a mason had again at intervals returned, and his sleep was broken by dreams of such a harassing nature that he would wake in the morning to examine his clothes, in the belief that he was now the victim of evil spirits. In such a condition it was not unnatural that his mind should take a colour from other days, where the reader may remember his own account of seeing the figure at the door after his father's death. Professor Masson, we see, notes this point, and he believes that Miller felt a strange fascination for all stories of second-sight. Though he never wrote or spoke of such, except in the sober tone of science, yet 'my impression,' he says, 'is that Hugh Miller did all his life carry about him, as Scott did, but to a greater extent, a belief in ghostly agencies of the air, earth, and water, always operating, and sometimes revealing themselves. One sees his imagination clinging to what his reason would fain reject.' The only hope lay in a total cessation from all work, but this was found impossible through the almost second nature which over-exertion had become to him. He had also a rooted dislike for all medicines, and it was with difficulty that he was induced to put himself under the management of Dr. Balfour and Professor Miller. The last day of his life was given to the revision of the proof-sheets of his _Testimony of the Rocks_, and in the evening he turned over the pages of Cowper, whose works had ever been among his standard favourites. By a curious fatality his eye rested on _The Castaway_, written by the poet in a similar mental condition, and which for sustained force and limpid expression is unrivalled as a religious lyric. He retired to rest on the night of the 24th December 1856. Next morning, his body, half-dressed, was found with a bullet from a revolver through his left lung. He had lifted a heavy woven jersey over his chest before he fired, which showed that death had not been accidental. On a table a