Elijah Beard Of Scotland

The Life of Hugh Miller - Electric Scotland

The new ship—The second marriage—Birth of Hugh Miller—An Apparition—Another Shipwreck and the Father drowned—A second supernatural appearance—Hugh Miller's widowed Mother—His first School—Early Reading.

By the catastrophe recorded at the close of last chapter, a catastrophe which was foretold by "portent dread," the "master" was rendered nearly penniless, and was about to sell the house which he had built, much below its real value, to enable him to commence the world anew, when a friend stepped forward—one of those true friends who are not afraid to lay hold of a sinking man, and try to keep his head above water—and advanced the money necessary to enable him to purchase a new ship. And so in due time a successor to the "Friendship" was fabricated wholly of sterling oak, under the eyes of the "master" himself, in which new and prosperous voyages were made. In due time, too, after the death of his aged cousin, he took to wife Harriet, one of the young friends of the old lady. The second Mrs. Miller was eighteen at the time of her marriage; the master was in his forty-fourth year, but he was a hale hearty man, and the disparity between their ages was no bar to the happiness of either. He was by all accounts, well fitted to make a woman who confided in him happy, and Mrs. Miller the second, during the six years she was his wife, never saw him angry but once.

Hugh Miller, the subject of our sketch, was one of the results of this second marriage. He was born in the house of John Fiddes, the buccaneer, on the 10th day of October, 1802. His memory, we are informed by himself, awoke soon, and one of its earliest treasures was the figure of old John Fiddes, which he saw one day (not in the body, be it observed) on the landing-place of the stair of the old house. The spirit of his ancestor seemed attired in a light blue greatcoat (a somewhat strange dress for an inhabitant of the other world to assume) and appeared to be regarding young Hugh with great complacency. The latter, however, although very fond of hearing the history of his relative narrated, was by no means gratified to see him in spiritual guise; and years after, when passing through the room from which he inferred the spirit must have come, he used to feel by no means sure that he would not tilt against old John in the dark. There were, however, more pleasant treasures in the memory of the boy than that of the stalwart buccaneer. He participated in the joy which used to flood the parent home with sunshine upon the arrival of the gallant sailor in the midst of his family after his voyages. Young Hugh learned to distinguish the sloop in the offing from all her sister craft by her twin square topsails and two dainty lines of white which ran along her sides. The splendid toys brought home from these voyages, no doubt, had their effect in enhancing the pleasure of the paternal arrival, but such a boy as Hugh Miller could also appreciate, to some extent, the intrinsic merits of such a father, and love him for his own sake. A bright, but too brief, happy time was the boy's intercourse with his father. The latter was engaged in collecting kelp, amid the Hebrides, for the Leith glass works, and in his last voyage he had been detained from the close of August till the beginning of October. At length, deeply laden, he set sail for his destination, and had got round Cape Wrath, through the Pentland and across the Moray Firths, when he was compelled, by stress of weather, to put in at Peterhead. On the 9th of November, 1807, he wrote his last letter to his wife. Next day he sailed from his temporary place of shelter, when there arose one of those storms so common on that coast at that season of the year, in which many a good ship perished, and many a brave seaman reached the termination of life's voyage. Captain Miller struggled manfully with the storm and succeeded, after much effort, in clearing a huge headland, which had lain on his lee for hours. The feat was seen by a brother Cromarty Skipper named Mathieson, who exclaimed, when he saw it successfully accomplished, "Miller's seamanship has saved him once more!" The struggling sloop had been seen for the last time by human eye by the Cromarty skipper. The precise mode of her destruction is not known, but, on that same night, it is supposed that, heavily laden and in a mountainous sea, she had started a plank and foundered. "And thus perished," says his son, "to borrow from the simple eulogium of one of his seafaring friends, whom I heard long after condoling with my mother, one of the best sailors that ever sailed the Moray Frith.

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