Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 28 CHAPTER III. THE DOOCOT CAVE. HE was twelve years old when the notable adventure of the Doocot Cave afforded him the subject of his first verses. The incident, slight in itself, happens to possess extraordinary interest in a biographical point of view. ' Man in immediate presence,' says Goethe, ' still more in remembrance, fashions and models the external world according to his own peculiarities.' An event which impresses the mind strongly in boyhood becomes entwined, as we proceed in our life-journey, with innumerable associations, and when at successive stages in our path we attempt to recall its precise circumstances, we fail to place them in their original bareness before the mind's eye. Suppose, then, that in endeavouring to know a man, to realize what, in the stages of his growth, he was and what he could do, we met with successive accounts from his pen of one and the same incident; would we not feel that a curiously instructive opportunity was afforded us of taking the observations necessary for our purpose ? How glad would the biographer of a great painter be to light upon a series of pictures from his hand, the subject the same in all, but the occasions when they were painted falling at different dates in his history, from the morningFIRST VERSES. 29 of life until its afternoon ! It is this advantage we possess in connection with Hugh Miller's boyish adventure in the Doocot Cave. There exist at least four accounts of the incident drawn up by himself,—four successive paintings of the same scene by the boy, the stripling, the man of twenty-seven, and the man of fifty. The first is that referred to in the Schools and Schoolmasters, as executed in ' enormously bad verse,' a day or two after the occurrence. The copy before me is the identical one which excite...