But besides this stated and formal visitation, which was intimated from the pulpit, constant attention was bestowed on the sick, the bereaved, the poor, the tempted, and all others who appealed specially to the minister’s heart or his conscience.  And yet there was no sense of task-work or of a burden to be borne about his relations to his congregation.  His exuberant frankness of manner, contrasting as this did with the reserved and somewhat stiff bearing of his predecessor Dr. Balmer, won the hearts of all.  And his keen sense of the ludicrous side of things often acted as an antiseptic, and kept him right both with himself and with his people.

Once, however, as he used to tell, it brought him perilously near to disaster.  He was in the middle of his sermon one Sunday afternoon in Golden Square.  It was a hot summer day, and all the doors and windows were open.  From the pulpit he could look right out into the square, and as he looked he became aware of a hen surrounded by her young family pecking vigorously on the pavement in search of food, and clucking as she pecked.  All at once an overwhelming sense of the difference between the two worlds in which he and that hen were living took possession of him, and it was with the utmost difficulty that he restrained himself from bursting into a shout of laughter.  As it was, he recovered himself with a mighty gulp and finished the service decorously enough.

Cairns was also assisted in his work by his phenomenal powers of memory.  After reading a long sermon once, or at most twice over, he could repeat it verbatim.  Once when he was challenged by a friend to do so, he repeated, without stopping, the names of all the children in his congregation, apologising only for his imperfect acquaintance with two families who had recently come.  Another instance of this is perhaps not so remarkable in itself, but it is worth mentioning on other grounds.  Five-and-thirty years after the time with which we are now dealing, when he was a professor in Edinburgh, some of his students were carrying on mission work in a growing district of the city.  An iron church was erected for them, but the contractor, an Englishman, before his work was finished was seized with illness and died.  He was buried in one of the Edinburgh cemeteries, and Dr. Cairns attended the funeral.  Having ascertained from the widow of the dead man that he had belonged to the Church of England, he repeated at the grave-side the whole of the Anglican Burial Service.  When he was asked afterwards how he had thus come to know that Service without book, he replied that he had unconsciously got it by heart in the early days of his Berwick ministry, before there was either a cemetery or a Burials Act, when he had been compelled to stand silent and hear it read at the funerals of members of his own congregation in the parish churchyard.