middle life, were relatives of his father, the connection dating from the time when his forebears were farmers in the same region.  They were a notable family, full of all kinds of interesting lore, literary, scientific, and pastoral, and they exercised a boundless hospitality to all, whether gentle or simple, who came within their reach.  One of them, a maiden sister, Miss Jean Darling, took a special charge of her young cousin, and in a special degree won his confidence.  From the first she understood him.  She saw the power that was awakening within him, and was, particularly in his student days, his friend and adviser.

As the summer of 1835 advanced, it came to be a grave question with him whether he could return to college in the ensuing winter.  His father had had a serious illness; and, though he was now recovering, there was a doctor’s bill to settle, and he still required more care and better nourishment than ordinary.  Cairns was afraid that, with these extra expenses to be met, his own return to College might involve too serious a drain on the family resources.  While matters were in this state, and while he was still at Longyester, he received a request from Mr. Trotter, the schoolmaster of his native parish of Ayton, to come and assist him in the school and with the tuition of boarders in his house.  This offer was quite in the line of the only ideas as to his future life he had as yet entertained; for, so far as he had thought seriously on the subject, he had thought of being a teacher.  On the other hand, while his great ambition was to return to the University, the fact that most of his class-fellows in the past session had been older than himself suggested to him that he could quite well afford to delay a year before he returned.

So he went to Ayton, lodging while there with his father’s youngest sister, Nancy, who had come thither from Ayton Hill along with her mother, when her brother John was married in 1814, and had remained there ever since.  Cairns had not been two months in Ayton before his responsibilities were considerably increased.  Mr. Trotter resigned his office, and the heritors asked the assistant to take charge of the school until a new teacher should be appointed.  There were between one hundred and fifty and two hundred children in the school; he was the sole teacher, and he was only seventeen.  Moreover, some delay occurred before the teacher who had been appointed to succeed Mr. Trotter could come to take up his work.  But Cairns proved equal to the situation.  The tradition is that his rule was an exceedingly stern one, that he kept the children hard at work, and that he flogged extensively and remorselessly.

When the new master arrived upon the scene, he subsided into his original post of assistant.  It had been his original intention to go back to the University in November 1836; but as that date approached it became evident that the financial difficulty was not yet removed, so he accepted an engagement to continue his work in Ayton for another year.