Nor will he fail to note the exact and characteristic point of difference in the two children, and how in each the child was father of the man. So early in both was the natural instinct of the future historian and the geologist awakened. At a later period he seems rather to have become an unruly lad, and to have proved too much for his relations to manage. He was in the stage when such boys run away to sea or enlist, and his father's own calling might, from its well-nigh hereditary nature, have been thought to be the one most likely to be adopted. He enjoyed a somewhat dangerous reputation through carrying a knife and stabbing a companion in the thigh, but these escapades may in later years have been unconsciously heightened by remorse for wasted opportunities, and which in his case we have seen to amount to little or nothing. But the circle of his own companions was changing or breaking up, and it became necessary to decide on the future. His mother, after being a widow for well-nigh a dozen years, had married again, and he determined on being a mason, an occupation which he thought would, by his being employed in labour at intermittent seasons, afford him plenty leisure. Against this resolution both his uncles stoutly protested, and were prepared to assist him to the Northern university. 'I had no wish,' he says, 'and no peculiar fitness to be either lawyer or doctor; and as for the Church, that was too serious a direction to look in for one's bread, unless one could necessarily regard one's-self as called to the Church's proper work, and I could not.' His uncles agreed to this view of the case; and so, reluctantly, the proposed course was abandoned. 'Better be anything,' they said, 'than an _uncalled_ minister.' His was not the feeble sense of fitness possessed in such a high degree by the presentees to Auchterarder and Marnoch. As a member of the Moray nation he would naturally have proceeded to King's College in Aberdeen, then at the very lowest ebb of its existence as regards the abilities, or the want of them, of the wondrous corps of professors who filled its chairs. Carlyle in his _Sartor_ has drawn certainly no flattering picture of the Edinburgh of his days, and his friend Professor Masson in the early volumes of _Macmillan's Magazine_ has put before us the no less wonderful spectacle of the Marischal College of his own student life; nor would the state of King's College about 1820 yield much material for respect. The professoriate was grossly ignorant and conceited, and nepotism was rampant. As a child, we can recall the last expiring flicker of the race, and when we add that one aspiring graduate had published a pamphlet to refute Newton, and that the theology was of the wintriest type of even Aberdonian moderatism, couched in the most remote imitation of the rhetorical flights in _The Man of Feeling_, we have said enough to show that Miller certainly lost nothing by non-attendance at the classes in Aberdeen.