Hugh Miller / by W. Keith Leask.

  • William Keith Leask
Date:
[pref. 1896]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hugh Miller / by W. Keith Leask. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    juvenile verse, which was recited ‘ with vast applause ’ by the handsomest girl at the Cromarty boarding establishment kept by Miss Elizabeth Bond. In her own early days she had known the father and mother of Scott; and, when in 1814 she had published her Letters of a Village Governess^ she had dedicated them to the great novelist, who later on in the midst of his own troubles, living in lodgings away from Abbotsford, could yet remember to send her ten pounds ‘to scare the wolf from the door,’ as he cheerily remarked, when she had found the truth of her own saying that it was hard for a single woman to get through the world ‘ without a head ’—unmarried. His reading at this time received a curious extension through there falling into his hands a copy of Military Medley belonging to a retired officer, and on the shore he would carry out plans of fortification as therein set forth by the great French engineer Vauban. With sand for towers, and variegated shells and limpets for soldiers, he worked his way through the evolutions of troops, and no reader of Scott will fail to remember the similar action by Sir Walter which, in the introduction to the third canto of Marniion^ he describes as taking place at Sandy Knowe, in the air of the Cheviots, near the old tower of Smailholme that ‘ charmed his fancy’s waking hour ’:— ‘ Again I fought each combat o’er, Pebbles and shells in order laid The mimic ranks of war displayed.’
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