MILLER'S SCENES AND LEGENDS. CONSIDERED by itself, this Traditional History

(yr Cromarly is a very pleasing and interesting book; when we look at the condition

of its author, it may be pronounced an extraordinary one. Mr. MILLER is, or was, a journeyman mason, working at his calling

for a shilling or two a day : he collected his materials during his daily labour, or on his holyday visits ; and must have devoted to study the hours allotted to recreation or snatched from sleep, to have qualified himself to fashion his matter with the skill which he displays. For the mere collection, indeed, our author was well placed—the trade of a country mason leads him frequently among tombstones and ruins, and draws about him the superan- nuated gossips of a place glad to talk of something; and what can be more apropos than the history of the matter in hand ? A workman struggling for a scanty living, and whose vocation is mostly carried on in the open air, sees nature at all times and under all aspects, when the heat, the cold, or the storm, confines the most ardent amateur worshipper to the house, and limits his observations to the view from the windows. The author's position in society. too, facilitated his observations upon humble life, by introducing him to the poor and lowly as an equal, from whom nothing need be kept back. Hence we are not surprised at the matter of his descriptions, the raciness of some of his tradi- tions, and his truthful picture of humble Scottish life. The won- der of the book lies in the execution, and in the author-like mind of the writer. There is nothing of clumsiness, and very little of elaborate overdoing— these two besetting sins of young penmen. MILLER is not only well read, but even learned; his style has a purity and elegance which remind one of Invitee, or of IRVING s master, GOLDSMITH : he has an ease and mastery of expression seldom attained except by much and careful exercise; and what is stranger, lie has a sensible and discriminating worldliness about hint, which leads him to rate things at their right value. His learned allusions, indeed, could now and then be spared with ad- vantage ; so might some of the personal opinions of the writer. Each of these " venial misfortunes," however, is much less con- spicuous in the pages of the stone-mason of Cromarty, than in those of men who rank themselves and are ranked by others pretty high in the republic of letters.

The apparent aim of Mr.M1LLER has been to do for the scenery, superstitions, legends, and characters of Cromarty, what WHITE did for the natural history of Selborne. He paints the land and sea views round about the town, and exhibits the town itself from

several points; tales of "ghosts and goblin grim " which he heard in his childhood, and those local creations which seem, like the genius loci of the ancients, to be limited to a district, have been caught up, preserved, and presented in his pages, just in time to save them from that oblivion to which the march of intel- lect is dooming all " old wives' fables." Has plague, pestilence, or famine, devastated the district—Mr. MILLER records its effects; has a natural phenomenon been preserved by tradition—it is to be found in his book ; we have notices of the lives of the more dis- tinguished persons connected with the place, and anecdotes of re- markable characters; whilst snatches of historical recollections arc pleasantly intermingled with the whole, and come upon us with that vague and misty kind of feeling which is experienced (and more easily felt than described) by childhood, when it listens to " tales told by beldatnes round the winter-hearth." The best things in the volume are too long for quotation ; and perhaps the book is one of that sort which requires the mind to get imbued with its own spirit, and become adapted to its tone, before the reader is able to appreciate its merits. Our extracts should therefore be considered as specimens of manlier rather than of matter.

MORTALS-DEN.

Rather more than a century ago, was the scene, says the tradition, of an in- teresting rencounter with one of the unknown class of'spectres. On a Sabbath noon, Zfarmer of the parish was herding a flock of sheep in a secluded corner of the den. He was an old gray-haired man, who for many years had been affected by a deafness, which grew upon him as the seasons passed, shutting out one variety of sounds after another, until at length he lived in a world off-unbroken silence. Though secluded, however, from all converse with his brother men, he kept better company than ever, and became more thoroughly acquainted with his Bible, and the fathers of the Reformation, than he would have been had he retained his lowing, or than almost any other person in the parish. He had just despatched his herd-boy to church, for he himself could no longer profit by his attendance there; his flock was scattered over the sides of the hollow ; and with his Bible spread out before him on a hillock of thyme and moss, which served him fur a desk, and sheltered on either hand from the sun and wind by a thicket of sweetbrier and sloe-thorn, he was engaged in reading, when he was startled by a low rushing sound, the first he had heard for many months. He raised his eyes from the book ; a strong breeze was eddying within the hollow, waving the falls and the bushes, and the portion of sea which appeared through the opening was speckled with white ; but to the old man the waves broke and the shrubs waved in silence. He again turned to the book ; the sound was again repeated ; and on looking up a second time, he saw a beautiful sylph-looking female standing before him. She was attired in a long, flowing mantle of green, which concealed her feet ; but her breast and arms, which were of exquisite beauty, were uncovered. The old man laid his band on the book, and raising himself from his elbow, fixed his eyes on the face of the lady. "Old man, said she, addressing him in a low sweet voice, which found prompt entrance at the ears that had so long been shut up to every other sound, "you are reading the book ; tell ate if there be any offer of salvation in it to us." " The gospel of this book," said the man, "is addressed to the lost children of Adam, but to the creatures of no other race." The lady shrieked as he spoke, and gliding away with the rapidity of a swallow on the wing, disappeared amid the recesses of the

hollow.

A ruin ORFI1AN'S TALE.

Sandy Wright shared with the boy his supper and his bed ; and on setting out on the following morning, he brought him along with him, despite the re- monstrances of the other boatmen, who dreaded his proving an incumbrance. The story of the little fellow, though simple, was very affecting. His mother, a poor widow, had lived for the five preceding years in the vicinity of Inverness, supporting herself and her boy by her skill as a sempstress. As early as his sixth year, he had shown a predilection for reading; acid, with the anxious solicitude of a Scottish mother, she hed wrought late and early to keep him at school. But her efforts were above her strength ; and, after a sore struggle of wally four years, she at length sunk under them. "Oh," said the boy to his companion, "often would she stop in the middle of her work, and lay her hand on her breast, and then she would ask me what I would do when she would be dead—and we would both greet. Her fingers grew white and sma,' andatbe couldna sit up at nights as before ; but her cheeks were reader and bonnier than ever, and I thought that she surely wouldna die. She has told me, that she was na eighteen years older than mysel'. Often, often when I waukened in the morning, she would be greetin at my bedside ; and I mind one day, when I brought home the first prize from school, that she drew me till her, an' told me wi' the tear in her e'e, that the day would come when her head would be low, that my father's gran' friends, who were ashamed o' her because she was poor, would be proud that I was connected wi' them. She soon couldna hold up her head at all ; and if it wasna for a neighbour woman, who hadna muckle to spare, we would have starved. I couldna go to the school, for I needed to stay and watch by her bed- side, and do things io the house ; and it vexed her more that she was keeping me from my learning, than that hersel was sae ill. But I used to read chapters to her out of the Bible. One day when she was sick, sick, two neighbour women came in ; and she called me to her and told me that when she would be dead, I would need to go to Edinburgh, for I had no friends anywhere else. Her own

friends were there, ehe seal, but they were poor and couldna do newkle for me ; and my father's friends were there too, and they were gran' and rich, though they wadna own her. She told me DO to be feared by the way, for that Provi-

dence kent every bit tat, and Ile would make folk to he kind to Me; and then she kissed, and grat, and bade MC go to the school. When I came out she was lying wi' a white cloth on her face, and the bed was all white. She was dead, dead, and I could do nothing but greet a' that night, and she was dead still. I'm now travelling to laiiinbiugh, as she bade me ; and folk are kind to me, jest as she said ; and I have letters to show me the way to my mither's friends when reach the town, for I can read write."

TILE wren %vier.

There lived, about a century ago, in the upper part of the parish of Cromarty, an chiefly female of that dispoeition of mind wilich Bacon describes as one of the very emus of limit' nature. lier faculties of enjoyment and suffering seemed

connected by sonic is ible tie to the an tunes of her neighbours; but this tie, un- like that of sympathy, which binds pleasure to pleasure MA sorrow to sorrow, by a strange Perversity united to each other the opposite feelings. She was happy when the people around her were unfortunate, and miserable when they prospered. So decided a misanthropy was met by a kindred feeling in those acquainted with her ; nor was site regarded with only that abhorrence which attaches to the evil wish and the malignant intention, but also with the con- tempt due to that impotency of malice which can only wish and intend.

Ilex sphere of mischief, however, though limited by her circumstances, was occupied to its utmost boundary ; and she frequently made up for her want of power by an ingenuity derived from what seemed in her au almost instinctive knowledge of the weaknesses of human nature. It was difficult to tell how she effected her schemes, but certain it was that in her neighbourhood lovers became

estranged and families divided. Late in the autumn of her last year, she formed one of a band of reapers employed in cutting down the crops of a Cro- marty farmer. Her partner on the ridge was a poor widow, who had recently lost her husband ; and who, though wasted by grief and sickness, was now toiling for her three helpless orphans. Every person on the field pitied her, but one ; and the malice of even that one, perverted as her dispositions were, would pro- bably have been disarmed by the helplessness of its object, hail it not chanced that about five years before, when the poor woman and her deceased husband were on the eve of their mareage, she had attempted to break off the match by casting sonic foul asperaions on her character. Those whom the wicked injure, says the adage, they never forgive ; and with ademoniac abuse of her knowledge of the dispositions of the people with whom she wrought, she strained beyond her strength to get ahead of them, knowing that a competition would necessarily take place, in which she trusted the widow would either bare to relinquish her employment, as above her strength, or so exhaust herself in the contest as to re- lapse into sickness. The expected struggle ensued ; but, to the surprise of every one, the widow kept up her place in the foremost rank until evening, when she appeared less fatigued than almost any of the party. The wretch who had oc- casioned it, and who had fallen behind all the others, seemed dreadfully agitated for the two last buttes it continued ; and she was heard by the persons who bound up the sheaves muttering the whole time words apparently of fearful meaning, which, however, were drowned amid the rustling of the corn and the hurry and confusion of the competition. Next morning she alone of all the reapers was absent ; and she was found by the et-Mow, who seemed the only one solicitous to know what had become of her, and who first entered her hovel toin- quire after her, tossing in the delirium of a fever. The poor woman, though shocked and terrified by her ravings and her agony, tended her till within half an hour of midnight, when she expired. At that late hour, a solitary traveller was passing the road which winds along the southern shore of the bay. The moon, in her last Tinter, had just risen over the bill on her right, and half veiled by three strips of cloud, rather re- sembled a bear of ignited charcoal seen through the bars of a grate, th in the orb which only a few nights before had enabled the reaper to prosecute his em- ployments until near morning. The blocks of granite scattered over the neigh- bouring beach, and bleached and polished by the waves, were relieved by the moonshine, and resembled flocks of sheep ruminating on a meadow; but nut a single ray rested on the sea beyana, or the path or fields before; the beam elided ineffectual along the level—it was light looking at darkness. On a sud- den, the traveller became conscious of that strange mysterious emotion which, according to the creed of the demonologist, indicates the presence or near ap- proach of an evil spirit. lie felt his whole frame as if creeping together, and his hair bristling on his bead ; and. filled with a strange horror, he heard through the dead stillness of the night, a faint, uncertain noise, like that of a sudden breeze rustling through a wood at the close of autumn. He blessed himself, and stood still. A tall figure, indistinct in the darkness, came gliding along the road from the east, and inquired of him, as it floated past, in a voice hollow and agitated, whether it could not reach Kirk Michael before midnight ? " No living person could," answered the traveller ; and the appearance, groaning at the reply, was out of sight in a moment. The sounds still continued, as if a multi- tude of leaves were filling from the boughs of a forest and striking with a pat- tering sound on the heaps congregated beneath, when another figure came up, taller, but even less distinct than the former. It bore the appearance of a man en horseback. " Shall I realet Kirk Michael before midnight?" was the query again put to the terrified traveller ; but before he could reply to it, the ap- pearance had vanished in the ,distance ; and a shriek of torment and despair, which seemed reechoed by the very firmament, roused him into a more intense feeling of horror. The moon shone out with supernatural brightness ; the noise, which had ceased for a moment, returned ; but the sounds were different, for they now seemed to be those of feint laughters, and low indistinct mutter- ings in the tone of ridicule, and the gigantic rider of a pale horse, with the ap- pearance of a female bent double before him, and accompanied by two dogs, one of which tugged at the head, and time other at the feet of the appear- ance, was seen approaching from the west. As this terrible apparition passed the traveller, the moon shone full on the face of the figure on the horse ; and he distinctly perceived, though the features seemed convulsed with agony, that they were those of the female, who, oukuown to hint, had expired suitor minuterbeb fore.

Mr. MILLER hints at the close of his volume, that should the present be favourably received, another may appear. If he really has materials for the task, we shall be glad to welcome it; but we would counsel him to be beware of overdoing his subject, for it is one which easily exemplifies the ne quid nimis. He may also remember, if success alone should stimulate him to work up a book, that no after expression by art and labour ever equals the first spontaneous runnings of the grape.