At the time of his father's death the son had just by one month completed his fifth year. At that time happened the circumstance which he himself relates, and which we mention here in this place both for the interest attaching to it in the history of his own mental development, and for various subtle psychological reasons to which we shall advert later, and which cannot fail to be observed by the careful student of his works. The last letter to his wife had been written by his father from Peterhead, and on its receipt, 'the house-door, which had been left unfastened, fell open, and I was despatched from her side to shut it. I saw at the open door, within less than a yard of my breast, as plainly as ever I saw anything, a dissevered hand and arm stretched towards me. Hand and arm were apparently those of a female: they bore a livid and sodden appearance; and, directly fronting me, where the body ought to have been, there was only blank transparent space, through which I could see the dim forms of the objects beyond. I commemorate the story as it lies fixed in my memory, without attempting to explain it.' In after years he would say of such mental or visual hallucinations that they were such as 'would render me a firm believer in apparitions, could I not account for them in this way, as the creatures of an imagination which had attained an unusual and even morbid strength at a time when the other mental faculties were scarcely at all unfolded.' In this connection the similar case of Chatterton need only be alluded to, but the question will be treated again in describing his later years. Like Burns, Carlyle, and Scott, Miller seems to have borne the powerful impress, mentally and physically, of his father. Yet, like the mothers of the first two, Mrs. Miller bequeathed to her son his store of legend and story and the imagination that was thus so early awakened. The new house which his father had built remained for some little time after his death untenanted; and, as the insurance of the sloop was deferred or disputed by an insolvent broker, his mother had recourse to her needle as the means by which she could best support her family. Three children had been born, and her brothers came to her assistance and lightened her task by taking her second daughter, a child of three, to live with them. Both of the girls died of a fever within a few days of each other, the one in her twelfth, and the other in her tenth year.