When his studies were over, Dr. Brown practised for a year as assistant to a surgeon in Chatham.  It must have been when he was at Chatham that a curious event occurred.  Many years later, Charles Dickens was in Edinburgh, reading his stories in public, and was dining with some Edinburgh people.  Dickens began to speak about the panic which the cholera had caused in England:  how ill some people had behaved.  As a contrast, he mentioned that, at Chatham, one poor woman had died, deserted by every one except a young physician.  Some one, however, ventured to open the door, and found the woman dead, and the young doctor asleep, overcome with the fatigue that mastered him on his patient’s death, but quite untouched by the general panic.  “Why, that was Dr. John Brown,” one of the guests observed; and it seems that, thus early in his career, the doctor had been setting an example of the courage and charity of his profession.  After a year spent in Chatham, he returned to Edinburgh, where he spent the rest of his life, busy partly with his art of healing, partly with literature.  He lived in Rutland Street, near the railway station, by which Edinburgh is approached from the west, and close to Princes Street, the chief street of the town, separated by a green valley, once a loch, from the high Castle Rock.  It was the room in which his friends were accustomed to see Dr. Brown, and a room full of interest it was.  In his long life, the doctor had gathered round him many curious relics of artists and men of letters; a drawing of a dog by Turner I remember particularly, and a copy of “Don Juan,” in the first edition, with Byron’s manuscript notes.  Dr. Brown had a great love and knowledge of art and of artists, from Turner to Leech; and he had very many friends among men of letters, such as Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Thackeray.  Dr. Brown himself was a clever designer of rapid little grotesques, rough sketches of dogs and men.  One or two of them are engraved in the little paper-covered booklets in which some of his essays were separately published—­booklets which he was used to present to people who came to see him and who were interested in all that he did.  I remember some vivacious grotesques which he drew for one of my brothers when we were schoolboys.  These little things were carefully treasured by boys who knew Dr. Brown, and found him friendly, and capable of sustaining a conversation on the points of a Dandy Dinmont terrier and other mysteries important to youth.  He was a bibliophile—­a taste which he inherited from his father, who “began collecting books when he was twelve, and was collecting to his last hours.”