The close of the period dealt with in the last chapter was made sadly memorable to Cairns by the death of some of his closest friends.  In October 1858 died the venerable Dr. Brown, with whom, since he was a student, he had stood in the closest relations, and whom he revered and habitually addressed as a father.  In November 1859 the bright spirit of George Wilson, the dearest of all his friends, passed away; and in the same year he had to mourn the loss of Miss Darling, the correspondent and adviser of his student days.  His brave old mother died in the autumn of 1860, and in the following year he lost another old and dear friend in Mrs. Balmer, the widow of his predecessor in Golden Square, who perhaps knew him better than his own mother, and had been deeper in his confidence than anyone since he came to Berwick.  From this period he became more reserved.  With all his frankness there was always a characteristic reticence about him, and this was less frequently broken now that those to whom he had so freely poured out his soul had been taken from him.  But he drew closer to those who were still left—­especially to his own kindred, to his sisters, to his brother William at Oldcambus, and to his brother David, who had now been settled for some years as minister at Stitchel, near Kelso.[14]

[Footnote 14:  His eldest brother, Thomas, had died from the effects of an accident in 1856.]

Dr. Brown had nominated him as one of his literary executors, and his family were urgent in their request that he should write their father’s Life.  With great reluctance he consented, and for eighteen months this task absorbed the whole of his leisure, to the complete exclusion of the work on “The Difficulties of Christianity,” with which he had already made some progress.  The undertaking was a labour of love, but it cannot be said to have been congenial.  Memoir writing was not to his taste, and in this case he had made a stipulation that still further hampered him and made success very difficult.  This was that he should omit, as far as possible, all personal details, and leave these to be dealt with in a separate chapter which Dr. Brown’s son John undertook to furnish.  This chapter was not forthcoming when the volume had to go to press, and was separately issued some months later.  When the inspiration did at length come to “Dr. John,” it came in such a way as to add a new masterpiece to English literature, and one which, while it gave a wonderfully living picture of the writer’s father, disclosed to the world as nothing else has ever done the true ethos and inner life of the Scottish Secession Church.  The Memoir itself, of which this “Letter to John Cairns, D.D.” is the supplementary chapter, is a sound and solid bit of work, giving an accurate and interesting account of the public life of Dr. Brown and of the movements in which he took part.  It is, as William Graham said of it, “a thoughtful, calm, conclusive book, perhaps too reticent and colourless, but none the less like Dr. Brown because of that.”