There was the additional reason in a desire to free the family from the burden of a house on the Coalhill of Leith, which had long before fallen to his father through the legacy of a relative, and which had threatened, through legal expenses, lack of tenants, and depreciated value, to become a serious legacy indeed. The parish church of North Leith had been erected, and he had been rated as a heritor for a sum so considerable that the entire year's rental of the dilapidated tenement was swallowed up, together with most of his savings as a mason. He had come of age when in the miserable hovel at Gairloch we have described, and was now competent to deal with his luckless property. Setting sail in the Leith smack running between Cromarty and that port, he entered the Firth of Forth four days after losing sight of the Sutors. He saw with interest Dunottar Castle and the Bass Rock chronicled in the well-known lines of his friend, Dr. Longmuir of Aberdeen. Indeed the latter had for him peculiar associations through one of the Ross-shire worthies in the times of Charles II.--James Fraser of Brea;--for, when the sun set on the upland farm on which he had been born, Miller knew that it was time to collect his tools at the end of his day's labour. In 1847, when he visited the rock on the geological expedition which he has commemorated by his paper on the structure of the Bass, his thoughts again reverted to Fraser, and to two other captives from his own district, Mackilligen of Alness and Hog of Kiltearn. His uncle James had at an early period introduced him to Burns and Fergusson, while from his boyish days the old novel of Smollett, _Humphrey Clinker_, had been no less familiar than from the pages of _David Copperfield_ we know it to have been to Dickens. It was, therefore, with no small interest that he caught his first view of Arthur Seat and the masts of the shipping in the harbour of Leith. It was still the veritable Auld Reekie' of Fergusson, preserving its quaint distinctiveness by the happy blending of the divisions of the old town and the new--the old town through which, says Lockhart, the carriage of Scott would creep at the slowest of paces, driven by the most tactful and discriminating of Jehus, while every gable and buttress in what a recent prosaic English guide-book denominates the most dilapidated street in Europe would crowd its storied memories upon the novelist and poet of the _Chronicles of the Canongate_. To the last, like Carlyle, he preserved the memory, ever a landmark to the patriotic Scot, of his first day in the old 'romantic town' of Sir Walter, and of his impressions of the most picturesque of European capitals. CHAPTER II IN EDINBURGH--THE CROMARTY BANK 'I view yon Empress of the North Sit on her hilly throne.' SCOTT.