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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.'"
The supernatural is strangely blended with
the irreparable loss which the "master's" family had sustained. In the
cottage at Cromarty there had been no forebodings of disaster, as the
greatest fury of the storm had been spent on the eastern coast. The wife
had received her letter, which was a hopeful one; and on the evening
after, she was sitting by the cheerful fire plying her needle, when the
house door, which had been left unfastened, fell open, and young Hugh
was sent to fasten it. "What follows," he says, "must be regarded as
simply the recollection, though a very vivid one, of a boy who had
completed his fifth year only a month before. Day had not wholly
disappeared, but it was fast posting on to night, and a grey haze spread
a neutral tint of dimness over every more distant object, but left the
near ones comparatively distinct, when 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 was fearfully startled, and ran shrieking to my
mother, telling what I had seen; and the house girl, whom she next sent
to shut the door, apparently affected by my terror, also returned
frightened, she said that she too had seen the woman's hand, which,
however, did not seem to be the case. And, finally, my mother going to
the door, saw nothing, though she appeared much impressed by the
extremity of my terror, and the minuteness of my description. We pause
not to inquire respecting the veracity of the apparition seen by the boy
Miller at the probable time of his father's death, nor to decide as to
the supernatural category under which spiritualists might class it- That
he believed as firmly as ever he believed any fact in physical science,
that he saw the dissevered hand and arm, there cannot, we think, be the
smallest doubt; but whether in the dim uncertain light of that closing
day, some local superstition had assumed form and made itself palpable
to the eye of the boy, or whether the appearance may have been
susceptible of explanation upon natural principles, we need not inquire.
The whole thing may have been an optical delusion, for aught we know;
but, on the other hand, it may not. Not only the boy, but the man, Hugh
Miller, assuredly believed that it was not; and although he has said
that the supposed apparition may have been merely a momentary affection
of the eye, of the nature described by Sir W. Scott in his "Demonology"
and Sir D. Brewster in his "Natural Magic," he adds that it was an
affection of which he experienced no after return, and that its
coincidence with the probable time of his father's death seemed at least
curious." His mother, as we have seen, was much impressed with the
extreme nature of the boy's terror, and the minuteness of his
description—another proof that to him, at least at the time, it seemed a
patent reality. A mature man, with an active imagination, may simulate a
terror, and fabricate a description which would impress either man or
woman; but a boy of five years of age must have been actually frightened
before he could have impressed his mother with his fright, and must have
believed that he had seen the object which excited his terror before he
could have given such a startlingly vivid description of it as he had
evidently given, when he rushed in from the door with "each particular
hair" standing on end. The neighbours who were privileged to be admitted
into the secret of the apparition, would, no doubt, regard it as a
presage of coming woe; but, whatever it may have been, or however it may
have been regarded, it constituted a not unfitting prelude to that
season of sorrow and darkness which supervened upon the loss of the
gallant sailor. Mr. Miller gives us a partial glimpse of that period of
sore trial in "My Schools and Schoolmasters." We can still see through
the shadows of these long departed years, the poor widow gazing upon the
vacant chair by the hearth never again to be filled by the burly, honest
man to whom she had consecrated her virgin affections. We can still
fancy her long fits of weeping as she thought of the briefness of their
married life, and the happiness which used to shed a halo •round her
existence during the short seasons which her husband passed upon land.
We can also imagine young Hugh keeping the widow company in crying,
although, poor fellow, he was too young to feel, in its full force, the
loss his mother and himself had sustained. Poverty came, too, and added
its darkness to that of bereavement. The new house was untenanted at the
lime, and although the sloop had been partially insured, the broker with
whom the master dealt was verging on bankruptcy, and as he placed
obstacles in the way of the insurance money being realised, it was a
long time before any of it was secured. The widow, however, bore up like
a christian woman against this adverse tide; and being left with three
of a family, Hugh and two daughters, she set herself bravely to the duty
of feeding and clothing them, with a firm faith, doubtless, in that
golden text which runs—" I have been young, and now am old; yet I have
not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread." She was a
cunning seamstress, and, after her household duties were over, she sat
up sewing for those who would employ her. And thus the time went on, and
although the love for the lost one still existed, the tears of the
bitter grief dried up, and the old pleasant past, before the storm came
with death enthroned on it, was thought of not as a season of happiness,
dead and buried, but with a new if a somewhat melancholy pleasure; and
although the sentiment had not then been expressed, the widow, we doubt
not, felt that
'Twas better to hare loved and lost,
Than never to have loved at all.
As for the widow's son, he could not believe
that his father's sloop was dashed to peices, and the father himself a
drowned man. So far as experience told him, his father had returned from
every voyage upon which he had embarked; and, although the sloop with
the twin square topsails, and the two dainty lines of white along her
sides, was longer in making her appearance than usual, he continued with
true boy-faith to believe in her return, and climbed day after day a
grassy protuberance which commanded a view of the Moray Firth, to look
out for her reappearance.
Previous to his father's death, Hugh Miller
had been sent to a dame's school, where he was taught to pronounce his
letters after a fashion peculiar to the dames who taught the young ideas
of the Scottish peasantry how to shoot, in the northern part of the
country during the first quarter of the present century. The present
writer had the happiness of first unravelling the mysteries of the
alphabet under one of those picturesque and energetic matrons—the last
of her race, we think, in that part of the country. Through the mists of
nearly forty years (heigho!) she looms out upon us a tall,
hard-featured, but, upon the whole, not hard-hearted woman; and we can
still hear her shouting at the top of her voice —(for she was deaf, and
believed that her pupils laboured under the same infirmity)—"Muckle Aw, little aw,"
and so on. Young Master Miller was taught his letters after a similar
type of pronunciation, and the quaint old style stuck to him through
life. The learning of -the letters was dry work—it is the same to every
child; but as soon as he discovered that the art of learning letters was
that of finding stories in books, its dryness disappeared, and it became
a decidedly interesting task. The history of Joseph was the first
treasure which his new art unlocked for him. This was succeeded by other
gems of sacred story; the history of Samson, of David and Goliah, of
Elijah and Elisha, and ultimately the New Testament was mined, and its
rich store of miracle and parable brought to light. A good literary
foundation this for a child to lay in his mind. Master Miller had, in
addition to these treasures of sacred story, abundance of profane
classics to draw upon also. "Jack the Giant Killer", "Jack and the Bean
Stalk," "The Yellow Dwarf," "Blue Beard," "Sinbad the Sailor," "Beauty
and the Beast," "Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp," constituted the
contents of a birch box nine inches square, and from that huge
repository the embryonic geologist drew immense stores of happiness. He
congratulated himself upon the fact that "Those intolerable nuisances
the useful-knowledge-books" had not yet arisen like tenebrious stairs on
the educational horizon to darken the world, and shed their blighting
influence on the opening intellect of the youth-hood and those of us who
had the privelege of reading such books as the treasures of the
birch-box, and who may have dipped with fear and trembling into the
useful knowledge libraries, can partly understand why he thus
congratulated himself. All the voyagings which juvenile mariners may
make into the arcana of nature with the aid of such compasses as books
with the title of "science made easy," will not do them half the good
which a severe course of reading in fairy and legendary lore will
accomplish for them; and we hold that the best of all proofs a boy can
give of the proper stuff being in him, is a persistent refusal to be
drugged with useful knowledge before he be well into his teens. Hugh
Miller had no useful-knowledge-books, and so he informs us that he
passed from his rudimental books without being conscious of break or
line of division, to books on which the learned are content to write
commentaries and dissertations, but which he found to be quite as "nice
children's books" as any others. One of these nice child's books was
Homer's "Odyssey," translated by Pope; another was Pope's translation of
the "Iliad"; and a third was "Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress," a book worth
a whole library of the useful-knowledge class, Hugh's copy of the
"Pilgrim" was one of the good old editions, "printed on coarse whity-brown
paper, and charged with numerous wood-cuts, each of which occupied an
entire page, which, on principles of economy, bore letterpress oh the
other side". "Robinson Crusoe" and "Gulliver's travels" were also read
by the young boy, and warmly admired, if not fully appreciated, we may
reasonably believe. These were the lighter works which he perused by the
Cromarty sea shore. More substantial intellectual food was gathered from
"Flavel's works," "Henry's Commentary," "Hutchison on the Lesser
Prophets," a very old treatise on the Revelations, with the title-page
away, and consequently anonymous. Blind Jamieson's volume on the
"Hierarchy" "Ambrose on Angels;" "Howie's Scotch Worthies," the MSS. of
which we have seen and handled. Solid books, every one of them, from
which our forefathers learned that profounder religious knowledge which
they possessed than we of the present time, and from which Hugh Miller
derived much of that sturdy spirit by which he was distinguished both
while hewing stones in a Cromarty quarry and conducting a Presbyterian
Church newspaper in an Edinburgh sanctum. |
