his clothes and his scanty stock of books all the
thirty-five miles between Dunglass and Edinburgh.

CHAPTER III

COLLEGE DAYS

When John Cairns entered the University of Edinburgh in November 1834
he passed into a world that was entirely strange to him. It would be
difficult to imagine a greater contrast than that between the
low-roofed village school and the spacious quadrangle surrounded by
heavily balustraded stone terraces and stately pillared facades, into
which, at the booming of the hourly bell, there poured from the
various classrooms a multitudinous throng of eager young humanity. And
he himself in some mysterious way seemed to be changed almost beyond
his own recognition. Instead of being the Jock Cairns who had herded
sheep on the braes of Dunglass, and had carried butter to the
Cockburnspath shop, he was now, as his matriculation card informed
him, "Joannes Cairns, Civis Academiae Edinburgeniae;" he was addressed
by the professor in class as "Mr. Cairns," and was included in his
appeal to "any gentleman in the bench" to elucidate a difficult
passage in the lesson of the day.

He attended two classes this winter--that of "Humanity" or Latin
taught by Professor Pillans, and that of Greek under the care of
Professor George Dunbar. Pillans had been a master at Eton, and at a
later period Rector of the Edinburgh High School. He was a little man
with rosy cheeks, and was a sound scholar and an admirable teacher,
whose special "fad" was Classical Geography. Dunbar had begun life as
a working gardener at Ayton Castle. He had compiled a Greek Lexicon
which had some repute in its day, but he was not an inspiring teacher,
and his gruff manners made him far from popular.

Trained by a country schoolmaster, and having no experience of
competition except what a country school affords, John Cairns had
until now no idea of his own proficiency relatively to that of others;
and it was something of a revelation to him when he discovered how far
the grounding he had received from Mr. M'Gregor enabled him to go. His
classical attainments soon attracted notice, and at the end of the
session, although he failed to win the Class Medals, he stood high
in the Honours Lists, and was first in private Latin studies and in
Greek prose. Nor were these the only interests that occupied him. A
fellow-student, the late Dr. James Hardy, writes of him that from the
first he was great in controversy, and that in the classroom duri