the hearts of all. And his keen sense of the ludicrous
side of things often acted as an antiseptic, and kept him right both
with himself and with his people.

Once, however, as he used to tell, it brought him perilously near to
disaster. He was in the middle of his sermon one Sunday afternoon in
Golden Square. It was a hot summer day, and all the doors and windows
were open. From the pulpit he could look right out into the square,
and as he looked he became aware of a hen surrounded by her young
family pecking vigorously on the pavement in search of food, and
clucking as she pecked. All at once an overwhelming sense of the
difference between the two worlds in which he and that hen were living
took possession of him, and it was with the utmost difficulty that he
restrained himself from bursting into a shout of laughter. As it was,
he recovered himself with a mighty gulp and finished the service
decorously enough.

Cairns was also assisted in his work by his phenomenal powers of
memory. After reading a long sermon once, or at most twice over, he
could repeat it verbatim. Once when he was challenged by a friend to
do so, he repeated, without stopping, the names of all the children
in his congregation, apologising only for his imperfect acquaintance
with two families who had recently come. Another instance of this is
perhaps not so remarkable in itself, but it is worth mentioning on
other grounds. Five-and-thirty years after the time with which we
are now dealing, when he was a professor in Edinburgh, some of his
students were carrying on mission work in a growing district of the
city. An iron church was erected for them, but the contractor, an
Englishman, before his work was finished was seized with illness and
died. He was buried in one of the Edinburgh cemeteries, and Dr. Cairns
attended the funeral. Having ascertained from the widow of the dead
man that he had belonged to the Church of England, he repeated at the
grave-side the whole of the Anglican Burial Service. When he was asked
afterwards how he had thus come to know that Service without book, he
replied that he had unconsciously got it by heart in the early days of
his Berwick ministry, before there was either a cemetery or a Burials
Act, when he had been compelled to stand silent and hear it read at
the funerals of members of his own congregation in the parish
churchyard.

Rather more than a year and a half after his ordination, in May 1847,
the Secession Ch