received every mark of respect, affection, and encouragement, and in regard to whom I feel moved to say, ’If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning,’ inclines me rather to self-examination and to serious fear lest any among you should have suffered through my failure to set forth and urge home this gospel of salvation.  If then any of you should be in this case, through my fault or your own, that you have not yet obeyed the gospel of Christ, I address to you in Christ’s name one parting call that you may at length receive the truth.”

A few weeks later he and his sister removed to Edinburgh, where they were joined in the autumn by their brother William.  William Cairns, who had been schoolmaster at Oldcambus for thirty-two years, was in many respects a notable man.  Deprived, as we have seen, in early manhood of the power of walking, he had set himself to improve his mind and had acquired a great store of general information.  He was shrewd, humorous, genial, and intensely human, and had made himself the centre of a large circle of friends, many of whom were to be found far beyond the bounds of his native parish and county.  Since his mother’s death an elder sister had kept house for him, but she had died in the previous winter, and at his brother’s urgent request he had consented to give up his school al Oldcambus and make his home for the future with him in Edinburgh.  The house No. 10 Spence Street, in which for sixteen years the brothers and sister lived together, is a modest semi-detached villa in a short street running off the Dalkeith Road, in one of the southern suburbs of the city.  It had two great advantages in Dr. Cairns’s eyes—­one being that it was far enough away from the College to ensure that he would have a good walk every day in going there and back; and the other, that its internal arrangements were very convenient for his brother finding his way in his wheel-chair about it, and out of it when he so desired.

The study, as at Berwick, was upstairs, and was a large lightsome room, from which a view of the Craigmillar woods, North Berwick Law, and even the distant Lammermoors, could be obtained—­a view which was, alas! soon blocked up by the erection of tall buildings.  At the back of the house, downstairs, was the sitting-room, where the family meals were taken and where William sat working at his desk.  He had been fortunate enough to secure, almost immediately after his arrival in Edinburgh, a commission from Messrs. A. & C. Black to prepare the Index to the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, then in course of publication.  During the twelve years that the work lasted he performed the possibly unique feat of reading through the whole of the twenty-five volumes of the Encyclopaedia, and thus added considerably to his already encyclopaedic stock of miscellaneous information.  Opening off the sitting-room was a smaller room, or rather a large closet, commanding one of the finest views in Edinburgh of the lion-shaped Arthur’s Seat; and here of an evening he would sit in his chair alone, or surrounded by the friends who soon began to gather about him,