Edinburgh will not soon forget his interest in the welfare of the poor, in which he has been so ably seconded by the present Dr. Guthrie.  I well remember beholding the two Christian reformers, standing above the slums of the city, contemplating the fields which the latter had assumed.  Suddenly Chalmers clapped his friend upon the back, and exclaimed, in rude pleasantry, ‘Wow, Tummus Guthrie, but ye ha a bonnie parish.’  Chalmers’ pronunciation was singularly broad, and not easily understood by many.  Stopping once, during a tour in England, at a place where there was a seminary, a gentleman inquired of him how many Scotch boys were in attendance.  ‘Saxtain or savantain,’ was the reply.  ‘Enough,’ says the gentleman, sotto voce, to corrupt a whole school.’  As regards calligraphy, Chalmers wrote the most illegible hand in Scotland.  He could not even read it himself, and was frequently obliged to call his wife and daughters to his aid.  Many of his discourses, when intended for the press, were copied by them.  His manuscript, when fresh from his hand, looked as though a fly had fallen into the ink-stand, and then crawled over the page.  When his letters were received at his paternal home, the language of the father was, ’A letter from Tummus, eh; weel, when he comes hame, he maun read it himsel.’  There was something Homeric in Chalmers’ mind; and Hugh Miller always considered him the bard of the Free Church, as well as its great theologian and still greater benefactor; and this, too, notwithstanding the fact that he never wrote a line of verse in his life.  The simplest truths, when announced by him, took a poetic shape, and moved along with all the majesty of his towering genius.  Speaking of Hugh Miller brings him before us at the time that he was writing for the Caledonia Mercury.  He was then editor of The Witness, but gave to the former paper such moments as he could abstract from his more serious duties.  His department in the Mercury was the reviewing new publications.  Besides his engagement with these two journals, he was pursuing those studies which made him the prince of British geologists.  Geology was his passion.  Indeed, while writing leaders for the Witness, or turning over the leaves of hot-pressed volumes, his mind was wandering among such scenes as the ‘Lake of Stromness,’ and the ‘Old Red Sandstone’ of his native Cromarty.  His geological sketches in the Witness were a new feature in journalism, and formed the basis of that work which so admirably refuted the ‘Vestiges of Creation.’  I met Miller daily for several years.  He was tall, and of a well-built and massive frame, and evidently capable of great endurance, both of mind and body.  Considered as one of the distinguished instances of self-made men, Hugh Miller finds his only parallel in Horace Greeley, although the path to greatness was in the first instance even more laborious than in the latter.  Let any one read Miller’s experiences and adventures, as described in ‘My Schools and my Schoolmasters,’ and he will find a renewed suggestion of the thought which Johnson so pathetically breathes in his ’London:’—­