paying for it, if not in money at least in kind. Thus it was settled
that John was to go to College, but nothing was settled beyond this.
Perhaps his parents may have had their own wishes, and his minister
and his schoolmaster their own expectations, about a career for him;
but in the boy's unworldly heart there was nothing as yet beyond the
desire for further learning and the earnest resolution to be not
unworthy of the sacrifices which had made the realisation of this
desire possible. He worked at his herding up till the day before
he left for the University, in the end of October 1834; and then,
starting in the middle of the night with William Christison, the
Cockburnspath carrier, he trudged beside the cart that conveyed the
box containing 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 façades, 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