historian.

Six years passed after this battle, and Dr. Brown was a medical student
and a clerk at Minto Hospital. How he renewed his acquaintance there,
and in what sad circumstances, with Rab and his friends, it is
superfluous to tell, for every one who reads at all has read that story,
and most readers not without tears. As a medical student in Edinburgh,
Dr. Brown made the friendship of Mr. Syme, the famous surgeon--a
friendship only closed by death. I only saw them once together, a very
long time ago, and then from the point of view of a patient. These
occasions are not agreeable, and patients, like the old cock which did
not crow when plucked, are apt to be "very much absorbed"; but Dr.
Brown's attitude toward the man whom he regarded with the reverence of a
disciple, as well as with the affection of a friend, was very remarkable.

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 Jua