rs. By this time many have learned to agree with a writer
in the "North British Review" that "Rab" is, all things considered, the
most perfect prose narrative since Lamb's "Rosamond Gray."

A new world of doctors, clergymen, shepherds, and carriers is revealed
in the writings of this cheerful Edinburgh scholar, who always brings
genuine human feeling, strong sense, and fine genius to the composition
of his papers. Dogs he loves with an enthusiasm to be found nowhere else
in canine literature. He knows intimately all a cur means when he winks
his eye or wags his tail, so that the whole barking race,--terrier,
mastiff, spaniel, and the rest,--finds in him an affectionate and
interested friend. His genial motto seems to run thus--"I cannot
understand that morality which excludes animals from human sympathy, or
releases man from the debt and obligation he owes to them."

With the author's consent we have rejected from his two series of "Horae
Subsecivae" the articles on strictly professional subjects, and have
collected into this volume the rest of his admirable papers in that
work. The title, "Spare Hours," is also adopted with the author's
sanction.

Dr. Brown is an eminent practising physician in Edinburgh, with small
leisure for literary composition, but no one has stronger claims to be
ranked among the purest and best writers of our day.

_BOSTON, December 1861._

CONTENTS.

RAB AND HIS FRIENDS
"WITH BRAINS, SIR"
THE MYSTERY OF BLACK AND TAN
HER LAST HALF-CROWN
OUR DOGS
QUEEN MARY'S CHILD-GARDEN
PRESENCE OF MIND AND HAPPY GUESSING
MY FATHER'S MEMOIR
MYSTIFICATIONS
"OH, I'M WAT, WAT!"
ARTHUR H. HALLAM
EDUCATION THROUGH THE SENSES
VAUGHAN'S POEMS
DR. CHALMERS
DR. GEORGE WILSON
ST. PAUL'S THORN IN THE FLESH
THE BLACK DWARF'S BONES
NOTES ON ART

AUTHOR'S PREFACE.

In that delightful and provoking book, "THE DOCTOR, &c.," Southey says:
"'Prefaces,' said Charles Blount, Gent., 'Prefaces,' according to this
flippant, ill-opinioned, and unhappy man, 'ever were, and still are, but
of two sorts, let the mode and fashions vary as they please,--let the
long peruke succeed the godly cropt hair; the cravat, the ruff;
presbytery, popery; and popery, presbytery again,--yet still the author
keeps to his old and wonted method of prefacing; when at the beginning
of his book he enters, either with a halter round his neck, submitting
himself to his readers' mercy whet