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,

"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