Hugh Miller / by W. Keith Leask.

Leask, W. Keith (William Keith), 1857-

Date:: [pref. 1896]

Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

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

33/168 (page 29)

Nor will he fail to note the exact and characteristic point of difference in the two children, and how in each the child was father of the man. So early in both was the natural instinct of the future historian and the geologist awakened. At a later period he seems rather to have become an unruly lad, and to have proved too much for his rela- tions to manage. He was in the stage when such boys run away to sea or enlist, and his father’s own calling might, from its well-nigh hereditary nature, have been thought to be the one most likely to be adopted. He enjoyed a somewhat dangerous reputation through carrying a knife and stabbing a companion in the thigh, but these escapades may in later years have been unconsciously heightened by remorse for wasted oppor- tunities, and which in his case we have seen to amount to little or nothing. But the circle of his own com- panions was changing or breaking up, and it became necessary to decide on the future. His mother, after being a widow for well-nigh a dozen years, had married again, and he determined on being a mason, an occu- pation which he thought would, by his being employed in labour at intermittent seasons, afford him plenty leisure. Against this resolution both his uncles stoutly protested, and were prepared to assist him to the Northern university. ‘ I had no wish,’ he says, ‘ and no peculiar fitness to be either lawyer or doctor; and as for the Church, that was too serious a direction to look in for one’s bread, unless one could necessarily regard