The church was in Golden Square, of which it may be said that it is neither a square nor yet golden, but a dingy close or court opening by an archway from the High Street, the main thoroughfare of Berwick.  The building was till recently a tannery, but the main features of it are still quite distinguishable.  It stood on the left as one entered from High Street, and it had the usual high pulpit at its farther end, with a precentor’s desk beneath it, and the usual deep gallery supported on metal pillars running round three of its four sides.  The manse, its door adorned with a decent brass knocker, stood next to the church, on the side farthest from the street.  It gave one a pleasant surprise on entering it to find that only its back windows looked out on the dim little “square.”  In front it commanded a fine view of the river, here crossed by a quaint old bridge of fifteen arches, which, owing to the exigencies of the current, is much higher at the Berwick end than at the other, and, as an Irishman once remarked, “has its middle all on one side.”  For some little time, however, after Cairns’s settlement, he did not occupy the manse, but lived in rooms over a shop in Bridge Street; and when at length he did remove into it, he took his landlady with him and still remained her lodger.

For the first five years of his ministry Cairns devoted himself entirely to the work which it entailed upon him, and steadily refused to be drawn aside to the literary and philosophical tasks which many of his friends urged him to undertake.  He had decided that his work in Berwick demanded his first attention, and, until he could ascertain how much of his time it would absorb, he felt that he could not go beyond it.  On the early days of the week he read widely and hard on the lines of his Sunday work, and the last three days he devoted to writing out and committing to memory his two sermons, each of which occupied about fifty minutes in delivery.  The “committing” of his sermons gave him little or no trouble, and he soon found that it could be relegated without anxiety to Saturday evening.  And he got into the habit of preparing for it by a Saturday afternoon walk to the little yellow red-capped lighthouse at the end of Berwick Pier.  At the upper end of the pier was a five-barred gate, and on the way back, when he thought that nobody was looking, he would vault over it with a running leap.

His preaching from the first made a deep impression.  Following the old Seceder tradition, and the example of his boyhood’s minister Mr. Inglis, and of his professor Dr. Brown, his discourse in the forenoon was always a “lecture” expository of some extended passage of Scripture, and forming one of a consecutive series; while that in the afternoon followed the familiar lines of an ordinary sermon.  But there was nothing quite ordinary in his preaching at any time.  Even when there was no unusual flight of eloquence, there was always to be noted the steady