“And smoke, yea, smoke and smoke.”

Sometimes a more than usually resounding peal of laughter would bring the professor down from his study to find out what was the matter, and to join in the merriment; and then, after a few hearty words of greeting to the visitors, he would plead the pressure of his work and return to the company of Justin or Evagrius.

His three nephews, who during the Edinburgh period were staying in town studying for the ministry, always spent Saturday afternoon at Spence Street, and sometimes a student friend would come with them.  Dr. Cairns was usually free on such occasions to devote an hour or two to his young friends.  He was always ready to enter into discussions on philosophical problems that happened to be interesting them, and the power and ease with which he dealt with these gave an impression as of one heaving up and pitching about huge masses of rock.  His part in these discussions commonly in the end became a monologue, which he delivered lying back in his chair, with his shoulders resting on the top bar of it, and which he sometimes accompanied with the peculiar jerk of his right arm habitual to him in preaching.  A snell remark of his brother William suggesting some new and comic association with a philosophic term dropped in the course of the discussion, would bring him back with a roar of laughter to the actual world and to more sublunary themes.  When the young men rose to leave he always accompanied them to the front door, and bade each of them good-bye with a hearty “[Greek:  Panta ta kala soi genoito],"[17] and an invariable injunction to “put your foot on it,”—­“it” being the spring catch by which the gate was opened.

[Footnote 17:  “All fair things be thine.”]

Once a week during the session a party of six or eight students came to tea at Spence Street, until the whole of his two classes had been gone over.  After tea in the otherwise seldom used dining-room of the house, some of the party accompanied the professor to the study.  Here he would show them his more treasured volumes, such as his first edition of Butler, which he would tell them he made a point of reading through once a year.  Others, who preferred a less unclouded atmosphere, withdrew with his brother into his sanctum.  Soon all reassembled in the dining-room, and a number of hymns were sung—­some of Sankey’s, which were then in everybody’s mouth, some of his favourite German hymns with their chorals, which might suggest references to his student days in Berlin or to later experiences in the Fatherland, and some by the great English hymn-writers.  At last came family worship, always impressive as conducted by him, but often the most memorable feature by far in these gatherings.  It was a very simple, and may seem a very humdrum, way of spending an evening; but the homely hospitality of the household—­the conversational gifts, very different in kind as these were, of himself and his brother—­and, above all, his genial and benignant presence, made everything go off well, and the students went away with a deepened veneration for their professor now that they had seen him in his own house.