London boots; the embers of the fire lay black and cold upon the sand, and these were the signs we left.

You, -you love sailing, - in returning from a cruise to the English coast, you see often enough a fisherman's humble boat far away from all shores, with an ugly black sky above, and an angry sea beneath, you watch the grisly old man at the helm, carrying his craft with strange skill through the turmoil of waters, and the boy, supple-limbed, yet weather-worn already, and with steady eyes that look through the blast, you see him understanding commandments from the jerk of his father's white eyebrow, now belaying, and now letting go, now crouching himself down into mere ballast, or baling out Death with a pipkin. Stale enough is the sight, and yet when I see it I always stare anew, and with a kind of Titanic exultation, because that a poor boat, with the brain of a man and the hands of a boy on board, can match herself so bravely against black Heaven and Ocean; well, so when you have travelled for days and days over an Eastern desert, without meeting the likeness of a human being, and then at last see an English shootingjacket and his servant come listlessly slouching along from out the forward horizon, you stare at the wide unproportion between this slender company and the boundless plains of sand through which they are keeping their way.

Once, during this passage, my Arabs lost their way among the hills of loose sand that surrounded us, but after a while we were lucky enough to recover our right line of march. The same day we fell in with a Sheik, the head of a family, that actually dwells at no great distance from this part of the desert during nine months of the year. The man carried a match-lock, of which he was very proud; we stopped and sat down, and rested a while for the sake of a little talk; there was much that I should have liked to ask this man, but he could not understand Dthemetri's language, and the process of getting at his knowledge by double interpretation through my Arabs was unsatisfactory. I discovered, however (and my Arabs knew of that fact), that this man and his family lived habitually, for nine months of the year, without touching or seeing either bread or water. The stunted shrub growing at intervals through the sand in this part of the desert, is fed by the dews which fall at night, and enables the camel mares to yield a little milk, which furnishes the sole food and drink of their owner and his people. During the other

three months (the hottest of the months, I suppose) even this resource fails, and then the Sheik and his people are forced to pass into another district. You would ask me why the man should not remain always in that district which supplies him with water during three months of the year, but I don't know enough of Arab politics to answer the question. The Sheik was not a good specimen of the effect produced by the diet to which he is subjected; he was very small, very spare, and sadly shrivelled -a poor, over-roasted snipe, a mere cinder of a man. I made him sit down by my side, and gave him a piece of bread and a cup of water from out of my goat-skins. This was not very tempting drink to look at, for it had become turbid, and was deeply reddened by some coloring matter contained in the skins, but it kept its sweetness and tasted like a strong decoction of Russia leather. The Sheik sipped this, drop by drop, with ineffable relish, and rolled his eyes solemnly round between every draught, as though the drink were the drink of the Prophet, and had come from the seventh heaven.

About this part of my journey, I saw the likeness of a fresh water lake. I saw, as it seemed, a broad sheet of calm water that stretched far and fair towards the south-stretching deep into winding creeks, and hemmed in by jutting promontories, and shelving smooth off towards the shallow side; on its bosom the reflected fire of the sun lay playing, and seeming to float upon waters deep and still.

Though I knew of the cheat, it was not till the spongy foot of my camel had almost trodden in the seeming waters, that I could undeceive my eyes, for the shore line was quite true and natural. I soon saw the cause of the phantasm. A sheet of water heavily impregnated with salts had filled this great hollow, and when dried up by evaporation had left a white saline deposit that exactly marked' the space which the waters had covered, and thus sketched a true shore-line. The minute crystals of the salt sparkled in the sun, and so looked like the face of a lake that is calm and smooth.

After the fifth day of my journey, I no longer travelled over shifting hills, but came upon a dead level - a dead level bed of sand, quite hard, and studded with small shining pebbles.

The heat grew fierce; there was no valley nor hollow, no hill, no mound, no shadow of hill nor of mound, by which I could mark the way I was making. Hour by hour I advanced, and saw no change -I was still the very centre of a round horizon; hour by hour I

advanced, and still there was the same-and the same, and the same, -the same circle of flaming sky - the same circle of sand still glaring with light and fire. Over all the heaven above-over all the earth beneath, there was no visible power that could balk the fierce will of the sun; "he rejoiced as a strong man to run a race; his going forth was from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it; and there was nothing hid from the heat thereof." From pole to pole, and from the east to the west, he brandished his fiery sceptre as though he had usurped all heaven and earth. As he bid the soft Persian in ancient times, so now, and fiercely, too, he bid me bow down and worship him; so now in his pride he seemed to command me and say, "Thou shalt have none other gods but me." I was all alone before him. There were these two pitted together, and face to face — the mighty sun for one, and for the other – this poor, pale, solitary self of mine, that I always carry about with me.

But on the eighth day, and before I had yet turned away from Jehovah for the glittering god of the Persians, there appeared a dark line upon the edge of the forward horizon, and soon the line deepened into a delicate fringe that sparkled here and there, as though it were sown with diamonds. There, then, before me were the gardens and the minarets of Egypt, and the mighty works of the Nile and I (the eternal Ego that I am!) — I had lived to see, and I saw them.

When evening came I was still within the confines of the desert, and my tent was pitched as usual, but one of my Arabs stalked away rapidly towards the west without telling me of the errand on which he was bent. After a while he returned; he had toiled on a grateful service; he had travelled all the way on to the border of the living world, and brought me back, for token, an ear of rice, full, fresh, and green.

The next day I entered upon Egypt, and floated along (for the delight was as the delight of bathing) through green, wavy fields of rice, and pastures fresh and plentiful, and dived into the cold verdure of groves and gardens, and quenched my hot eyes in shade, as though in deep rushing waters.

HUGH MILLER.

Hugh Miller was born in Cromarty, in Scotland, in 1802. He received a very limited education; but he was an assiduous reader, and in early youth acquired the general information and the studious habits that formed the basis of his literary character. He was an acute observer of nature, and his trade that of a stone mason-led him naturally into the practical study of geology. His discoveries and his brilliant style of description soon made his name famous. He would have been an eminent geologist without any aid from literary art; and his sensibility, taste, and skill would have made him an eminent writer without any special scientific culture. His principal works are, Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland, My Schools and Schoolmasters, The Cruise of the Betsey, First Impressions of England and its People, Geology of the Bass Rock, The Old Red Sandstone, Footprints of the Creator, and The Testimony of the Rocks. He wrote also a volume of immature poems, and contributed a great number of articles to The Witness, an Edinburgh newspaper. He was at one time a bank officer in his native town; but during the most productive part of his life he resided in the capital. During an attack of insanity, brought on by over-exertion at the completion of the Testimony of the Rocks, he committed suicide with a pistol, in 1856, at Portobello, near Edinburgh.

A certain Mr. Brown, of Glasgow, who has written of his Life and Times, enjoys the distinction of having issued perhaps the worst and most tantalizing biography of a truly great man which the century has beheld. After placing the figure of Hugh Miller on a pedestal as the greatest representative Scotchman, and having whistled Scott, Burns, and Carlyle down the wind, the author treats us to disquisitions upon Scottish history, Free Church politics, reprobation of Dickens, and of the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, estimates of Cromwell, denunciations of Macaulay, and a great deal more of Mr. Brown's own private opinions; but the subject of the memoir remains a shadow, as in the beginning. A nature so genial, gifted with such rare powers of perception and analysis, and armed with such consummate literary skill, deserved an appreciative and modest biographer. It is not too late, perhaps, to hope for a life worthy of the illustrious subject.

THE DROPPING-CAVE OF CROMARTY.

[From Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland.]

IN perusing, in some of our older gazetteers, the half page devoted to Cromarty, we find that among the natural curiosities of the place there is a small cavern termed the Dropping-cave, famous for its stalactites and its petrifying stones.

And though the progress of modern discovery has done much to lower the wonder, by rendering it merely one of thousands of the same class, - for even among the cliffs of the hill in which the cavern is perforated, there is scarcely a spring that has not its border of coral-like petrifactions, and its moss, and grass, and nettle-stalks of marble, the Dropping-cave may well be regarded as a curiosity still. It is hollowed, a few feet over the beach, in the face of one of the low precipices which skirt the entrance of the bay. From a crag which overhangs the opening there falls a perpetual drizzle, which, settling on the moss and lichens beneath, converts them into stone; and on entering the long, narrow apartment within, there may be seen, by the dim light of the entrance, a series of springs,

which filter through the solid rock above, descending in so continual a shower, that even in the sultriest days of midsummer, when the earth is parched, and the grass has become brown and withered, we may hear the eternal drop pattering against the rough stones of the bottom, or tinkling in the recess within, like the string of a harp struck to ascertain its tone. A stone flung into the interior, after rebounding from side to side of the rock, falls with a deep, hollow plunge, as if thrown into the sea.

There was a tradition current in Cromarty that a townsman had once passed through the Dropping-cave, until he heard a pair of tongs rattle over his head on the hearth of a farm-house of Navity, a district of the parish which lies fully three miles from the opening; and Willie, who was, it seems, as hard of belief in such matters as if he himself had never drawn on the credulity of others, resolved on testing the story by exploring the cave. He sewed sprigs of rowan and wych-elm in the hem of his waistcoat, thrust a Bible into one pocket, and a bottle of gin into the other, and providing himself with a torch, and a staff of buckthorn which had been cut at the full of the moon, and dressed without the assistance of iron or steel, he set out for the cave on a morning of midsummer. It was evening ere he returned his torch burned out, and his clothes stained with mould and slime, and soaked with water. After lighting his torch, he said, and taking a firm grasp of the staff, he plunged fearlessly into the gloom before him. The cavern narrowed and lowered as he proceeded; the floor, which was of a white stone resembling marble, was hollowed into cisterns, filled with a water so exceedingly pure, that it sparkled to the light like spirits in crystal; and from the roof there depended clusters of richly-embossed icicles of white stone, like those which, during a severe frost, hang at the edge of a waterfall. The springs from above trickled along their channelled sides, and then tinkled into the cisterns, like rain from the eaves of a cottage after a thunder shower.

Perhaps he looked too curiously around him when remarking all this; for so it was, that at the ninth and last cistern, he missed his footing, and falling forward, shattered his bottle of gin against the side of the cave. The liquor ran into a little hollow of the marble; and unwilling to lose what he regarded as very valuable, and what certainly had cost him some trouble and suffering to procure (for he rowed half way across the frith for it, in terror of the custom-house and a cockling sea), he stooped down and drank until his breath failed him. Never was there better Nantz; and pausing to recover himself, he stooped and drank, and stooped and drank, again and