Chapter I: Front Matter (1)

_HORAE SUBSECIVAE._

"_A lady, resident in Devonshire, going into one of her parlors,
discovered a young ass, who had found his way into the room, and
carefully closed the door upon himself. He had evidently not
been long in this situation before he had nibbled a part of
Cicero's Orations, and eaten nearly all the index of a folio
edition of Seneca in Latin, a large part of a volume of La
Bruyere's Maxims in French, and several pages of Cecilia. He
had done no other mischief whatever, and not a vestige remained
of the leaves that he had devoured._"--PIERCE EGAN.

"_The treatment of the illustrious dead by the quick, often
reminds me of the gravedigger in Hamlet, and the skull of poor
defunct Yorick._"--W. H. B.

"_Multi ad sapientiam pervenire potuissent, nisi se jam
pervenisse putassent._"

"_There's nothing so amusing as human nature, but then you must
have some one to laugh with._"

SPARE HOURS

BY JOHN BROWN, M. D.

If thou be a severe sour-complexioned man, then I here disallow
thee to be a competent judge.--IZAAK WALTON

BOSTON
TICKNOR AND FIELDS
1864

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1861, by
TICKNOR AND FIELDS,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the
District of Massachusetts

RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE:
STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY H. O. HOUGHTON

NOTE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.

The author of "Rab and his Friends" scarcely needs an introduction to American readers. By this time many have learned to agree with a writer in the "North British Review" that "Rab" is, all things considered, the most perfect prose narrative since Lamb's "Rosamond Gray."

A new world of doctors, clergymen, shepherds, and carriers is revealed in the writings of this cheerful Edinburgh scholar, who always brings genuine human feeling, strong sense, and fine genius to the composition of his papers. Dogs he loves with an enthusiasm to be found nowhere else in canine literature. He knows intimately all a cur means when he winks his eye or wags his tail, so that the whole barking race,--terrier, mastiff, spaniel, and the rest,--finds in him an affectionate and interested friend. His genial motto seems to run thus--"I cannot understand that morality which excludes animals from human sympathy, or releases man from the debt and obligation he owes to them."

With the author's consent we have rejected from his two series of "Horae Subsecivae" the articles on strictly professional subjects, and have collected into this volume the rest of his admirable papers in that work. The title, "Spare Hours," is also adopted with the author's sanction.

Dr. Brown is an eminent practising physician in Edinburgh, with small leisure for literary composition, but no one has stronger claims to be ranked among the purest and best writers of our day.

_BOSTON, December 1861._

CONTENTS.

RAB AND HIS FRIENDS
"WITH BRAINS, SIR"
THE MYSTERY OF BLACK AND TAN
HER LAST HALF-CROWN
OUR DOGS
QUEEN MARY'S CHILD-GARDEN
PRESENCE OF MIND AND HAPPY GUESSING
MY FATHER'S MEMOIR
MYSTIFICATIONS
"OH, I'M WAT, WAT!"
ARTHUR H. HALLAM
EDUCATION THROUGH THE SENSES
VAUGHAN'S POEMS
DR. CHALMERS
DR. GEORGE WILSON
ST. PAUL'S THORN IN THE FLESH
THE BLACK DWARF'S BONES
NOTES ON ART

AUTHOR'S PREFACE.

In that delightful and provoking book, "THE DOCTOR, &c.," Southey says: "'Prefaces,' said Charles Blount, Gent., 'Prefaces,' according to this flippant, ill-opinioned, and unhappy man, 'ever were, and still are, but of two sorts, let the mode and fashions vary as they please,--let the long peruke succeed the godly cropt hair; the cravat, the ruff; presbytery, popery; and popery, presbytery again,--yet still the author keeps to his old and wonted method of prefacing; when at the beginning of his book he enters, either with a halter round his neck, submitting himself to his readers' mercy whether he shall be hanged or no, or else, in a huffing manner, he appears with the halter in his hand, and threatens to hang his reader, if he gives him not his good word. This, with the excitement of friends to his undertaking, and some few apologies for the want of time, books, and the like, are the constant and usual shams of all scribblers, ancient and modern.' This was not true then," says Southey, "nor is it now." I differ from Southey, in thinking there is some truth in both ways of wearing the halter. For though it be neither manly nor honest to affect a voluntary humility (which is after all, a sneaking vanity, and would soon show itself if taken at its word), any more than it is well-bred, or seemly to put on (for it generally is put on) the "huffing manner," both such being truly "shams,"--there is general truth in Mr. Blount's flippancies.

Every man should know and lament (to himself) his own shortcomings--should mourn over and mend, as he best can, the "confusions of his wasted youth;" he should feel how ill he has put out to usury the talent given him by the Great Taskmaster--how far he is from being "a good and faithful servant;" and he should make this rather understood than expressed by his manner as a writer; while at the same time, every man should deny himself the luxury of taking his hat off to the public, unless he has something to say, and has done his best to say it aright; and every man should pay not less attention to the dress in which his thoughts present themselves, than he would to that of his person on going into company.

Bishop Butler, in his "Preface to his Sermons," in which there is perhaps more solid living sense than in the same number of words anywhere else after making the distinction between "obscurity" and "perplexity and confusion of thought,"--the first being in the subject, the others in its expression, says,--"confusion and perplexity are, in writing, indeed without excuse, because any one may, if he pleases, know whether he understands or sees through what he is about, and it is unpardonable in a man to lay his thoughts before others, when he is conscious that he himself does not know whereabouts he is, or how the matter before him stands. _It is coming abroad in disorder, which he ought to be dissatisfied to find himself in at home._"

There should therefore be in his Preface, as in the writer himself, two elements. A writer should have some assurance that he has something to say, and this assurance should, in the true sense, not the Milesian, be modest.

* * * * *

I have to apologize for bringing in "Rab and his Friends." I did so, remembering well the good I got then, as a man and as a doctor. It let me see down into the depths of our common nature, and feel the strong and gentle touch that we all need, and never forget, which makes the world kin; and it gave me an opportunity of introducing, in a way which he cannot dislike, for he knows it is simply true, my old master and friend, Professor Syme, whose indenture I am thankful I possess, and whose first wheels I delight in thinking my apprentice-fee purchased, thirty years ago. I remember as if it were yesterday, his giving me the first drive across the west shoulder of Corstorphine Hill. On starting, he said, "John, we'll do one thing at a time, and there will be no talk." I sat silent and rejoicing, and can remember the very complexion and clouds of that day and that matchless view: _Damyat_ and _Benledi_ resting couchant at the gate of the Highlands, with the huge Grampians, _immane pecus_, crowding down into the plain.

This short and simple story shows, that here, as everywhere else, personally, professionally, and publicly, reality is his aim and his attainment. He is one of the men--they are all too few--who desire to be on the side of truth more than to have truth on their side; and whose personal and private worth are always better understood than expressed. It has been happily said of him, that he never wastes a word, or a drop of ink, or a drop of blood; and his is the strongest, exactest, truest, immediatest, safest intellect, dedicated by its possessor to the surgical cure of mankind, I have ever yet met with. He will, I firmly believe, leave an inheritance of good done, and mischief destroyed, of truth in theory and in practice established, and of error in the same exposed and ended, such as no one since John Hunter has been gifted to bequeath to his fellow-men. As an instrument for discovering truth, I have never seen his perspicacity equalled; his mental eye is _achromatic_, and admits into the judging mind a pure white light, and records an undisturbed, uncolored image, undiminished and unenlarged in its passage; and he has the moral power, courage, and conscience, to use and devote such an inestimable instrument aright. I need hardly add, that the story of "Rab and his Friends" is in all essentials strictly matter of fact.

There is an odd sort of point, if it can be called a point, on which I would fain say something--and that is an occasional outbreak of sudden, and it may be felt, untimely humorousness. I plead guilty to this, sensible of the tendency in me of the merely ludicrous to intrude, and to insist on being attended to, and expressed: it is perhaps too much the way with all of us now-a-days, to be forever joking. _Mr. Punch_, to whom we take off our hats, grateful for his innocent and honest fun, especially in his Leech, leads the way; and our two great novelists, Thackeray and Dickens, the first especially, are, in the deepest and highest sense, essentially humorists,--the best, nay, indeed the almost only good thing in the latter, being his broad and wild fun; Swiveller, and the Dodger, and Sam Weller, and Miggs, are more impressive far to my taste than the melo-dramatic, utterly unreal Dombey, or his strumous and hysterical son, or than all the later dreary trash of "Bleak House," &c.

My excuse is, that these papers are really what they profess to be, done at bye-hours. _Dulce est desipere_, when in its fit place and time. Moreover, let me tell my young doctor friends, that a cheerful face, and step, and neckcloth, and button-hole, and an occasional hearty and kindly joke, a power of executing and setting agoing a good laugh, are stock in our trade not to be despised. The merry heart does good like a medicine. Your pompous man, and your selfish man, don't laugh much, or care for laughter; it discomposes the fixed grandeur of the one, and has little room in the heart of the other, who is literally self-contained. My Edinburgh readers will recall many excellent jokes of their doctors--"Lang Sandie Wood," Dr. Henry Davidson our _Guy Patin_ and better, &c.

I may give an instance, when a joke was more and better than itself. A comely young wife, the "cynosure" of her circle, was in bed, apparently dying from swelling and inflammation of the throat, an inaccessible abscess stopping the way; she could swallow nothing; everything had been tried. Her friends were standing round her bed in misery and helplessness. "_Try her wi' a compliment_," said her husband, in a not uncomic despair. She had genuine humor, as well as he; and as physiologists know, there is a sort of mental tickling which is beyond and above control, being under the reflex system, and instinctive as well as sighing. She laughed with her whole body and soul, and burst the abscess, and was well.

Humor, if genuine (and if not, it is not humor), is the very flavor of the spirit, its rich and fragrant _ozmazome_--having in its aroma something of everything in the man, his expressed juice; wit is but the laughing flower of the intellect or the turn of speech, and is often what we call a "gum-flower," and looks well when dry. Humor is, in a certain sense, involuntary in its origin in one man, and in its effect upon another; it is systemic, and not local.

Sydney Smith, in his delightful and valuable _Sketches of Lectures on Moral Philosophy_, to which I have referred, makes a touching and impressive confession of the evil to the rest of a man's nature from the predominant power and cultivation of the ludicrous. I believe Charles Lamb could have told a like, and as true, but sadder story. He started on life with all the endowments of a great, ample, and serious nature, and he ended in being little else than the incomparable joker and humorist, and was in the true sense, "of large discourse."[1]

[1] Many good and fine things have been said of this wonderful
and unique genius, but I know none better or finer than
these lines by my friend John Hunter of Craigcrook. They are
too little known, and no one will be anything but pleased to
read them, except their author. The third line might have
been Elia's own:--

"... Humor, wild wit,
Quips, cranks, puns, sneers,--with clear sweet thought profound;--
_And stinging jests, with honey for the wound_,"--
The subtlest lines of ALL fine powers, split
To their last films, then marvellously spun
In magic web, whose million hues are ONE!"

I knew one man who was almost altogether and absolutely
comic, and yet a man of sense, fidelity, courage, and worth,
but over his entire nature the comic ruled supreme--the late
Sir Adam Ferguson, whose very face was a breach of
solemnity; I dare say, even in sleep he looked a wag. This
was the way in which everything appeared to him first, and
often last too, with a serious enough middle saw him not
long before his death, when he was of great age and knew he
was dying; there was no levity in his manner, or
thoughtlessness about his state; he was kind, and shrewd as
ever; but how he flashed out with utter merriment when he
got hold of a joke, or rather when it got hold of him, and
shook him, not an inch of his body was free of its power--it
possessed him, not he it. The first attack was on showing me
a calotype of himself by the late Adamson (of Hill and
Adamson; the Vandyke and Raeburn of photography), in the
corner of which he had written, with a hand trembling with
age and fun, "Adam's-sun _fecit_"--it came back upon him and
tore him without mercy.

Then, his blood being up, he told me a story of his uncle,
the great Dr. Black the chemist; no one will grudge the
reading of it in my imperfect record, though it is to the
reality what reading music is to hearing it.

Dr. Black, when Professor of Chemistry in Edinburgh
University, had a gruff old man as his porter, a James
Alston. James was one of the old school of chemistry, and
held by phlogiston, but for no better reason than the
endless trouble the new-fangled discoveries brought upon him
in the way of apparatus.

The Professor was lecturing on Hydrogen Gas, and had made
arrangements for showing its lightness, what our preceptor,
Dr. Charles Hope, called, in his lofty way, its "principle
of absolute levity." He was greatly excited, the good old
man of genius. James was standing behind his chair, ready
and sulky. His master told his young friends that the
bladder he had filled with the gas must, on principle,
ascend; but that they would see practically if it did, and
he cut the string. Up it rushed, amid the shouts and
upturned faces of the boys, and the quiet joy of their
master; James regarding it with a glum curiosity.

Young Adam Ferguson was there, and left at the end of the
hour with the rest, but finding he had forgotten his stick,
went back; in the empty room, he found James perched upon a
lofty and shaky ladder, trying, amid much perspiration, and
blasphemy, and want of breath, to hit down his enemy, who
rose at each stroke--the old battling with the new. Sir
Adam's reproduction of this scene, his voice and screams of
rapture, I shall never forget.

Let me give another pleasant story of Dr. Black and Sir
Adam, which our Principal (Dr. Lee) delights to tell; it is
merely its bones. The doctor sent him to the bank for
L5--four in notes, and one in silver; then told him that he
must be paid for his trouble with a shilling, and next
proceeded to give him good advice about the management of
money, particularly recommending a careful record of every
penny spent, holding the shilling up before him all the
time. During this address, Sir Adam was turning over in his
mind all the trash he would be able to purchase with the
shilling, and his feeling may be imagined when the doctor
finally returned it to his own pocket.

It only remains now for me to thank my cousin and life-long friend, John Taylor Brown, the author of the tract on "St. Paul's Thorn in the Flesh." I am sure my readers will thank me not less heartily than I now do him. The theory that the thorn of the great apostle was an affection of the eyes is not new; it will be found in "Hannah More's Life," and in "Conybeare and Howson;" but his argument and his whole treatment, I have reason to believe, from my father and other competent judges, is thoroughly original; it is an exquisite monograph, and to me most instructive and striking. Every one will ask why such a man has not written more--a question my fastidious friend will find is easier asked than answered.

* * * * *

This Preface was written, and I had a proof ready for his pencil, when I was summoned to the death of him to whom I owe my life. He had been dying for months, but he and I hoped to have got and to have given into his hands a copy of these _Horae_, the correction of which had often whiled away his long hours of languor and pain. God thought otherwise. I shall miss his great knowledge, his loving and keen eye--his _ne quid nimis_--his sympathy--himself. Let me be thankful that it was given to me _assidere valetudini, fovere deficientem, satiari vultu, complexu_.

_Si quis piorum manibus locus; si, ut sapientibus placet, non cum corpore extinguuntur magnae animae; placide quiescas!_

Or, in more sacred and hopeful words, which, put there at my father's request, may be found at the close of the paper on young Hallam: "O man greatly beloved, go thou thy way till the end; for thou shalt rest, and stand in thy lot at the end of the days."

It is not for a son to speak what he thinks of his father so soon after his death. I leave him now with a portrait of his spiritual lineaments, by Dr. Cairns,--which is to them what a painting by Velasquez and Da Vinci combined would have been to his bodily presence.

"As he was of the Pauline type of mind, his
Christianity ran into the same mould. A strong,
intense, and vehement nature, with masculine
intellect and unyielding will, he accepted the Bible
in its literal simplicity as an absolute revelation,
and then showed the strength of his character in
subjugating his whole being to this decisive
influence, and in projecting the same convictions
into other minds. He was a believer in the sense of
the old Puritans, and, amid the doubt and skepticism
of the nineteenth century, held as firmly as any of
them by the doctrines of atonement and grace. He had
most of the idiosyncrasy of Baxter, though not
without the contemplation of Howe. The doctrines of
Calvinism, mitigated but not renounced, and received
simply as dictates of Heaven, without any effort or
hope to bridge over their inscrutable depths by
philosophical theories, he translated into a
fervent, humble, and resolutely active life.

"There was a fountain of tenderness in his nature as
well as a sweep of impetuous indignation; and the
one drawn out, and the other controlled by his
Christian faith, made him at once a philanthropist
and a reformer, and both in the highest departments
of human interest. The union of these ardent
elements, and of a highly devotional temperament,
not untouched with melancholy, with the patience of
the scholar, and the sobriety of the critic, formed
the singularity and almost the anomaly of his
personal character. These contrasts were tempered by
the discipline of experience; and his life, both as
a man and a Christian, seemed to become more rich,
genial, and harmonious as it approached its
close."--_Scotsman_, October 20th.

J. B.

23, RUTLAND STREET, _October 30, 1858_.

POST PREFACE.

I have to thank the public and my own special craft cordially and much for their reception of these Idle Hours--Brown Studies, as a friendly wag calls them--and above all, for their taking to their hearts that great old dog and his dead friends,--for all which the one friend who survives thanks them. There is no harm and some good in letting our sympathy and affection go forth without stint on such objects, dead and homely though they be.

When I think of that noble head, with its look and eye of boundless affection and pluck, simplicity and single-heartedness, I feel what it would be for us, who call ourselves the higher animals, to be in our ways as simple, affectionate, and true, as that old mastiff; and in the highest of all senses, I often think of what Robert Burns says somewhere, "Man is the god of the dog." It would be well for man if his worship were as immediate and instinctive--as absolute as the dog's. Did we serve our God with half the zeal Rab served his, we might trust to sleep as peacefully in our graves as he does in his. When James turned his angry eye and raised his quick voice and foot, his worshipper slunk away, humbled and afraid, angry with himself for making _him_ angry; anxious by any means to crouch back into his favor, and a kind look or word. Is that the way we take His displeasure, even when we can't think, as Rab couldn't, we were immediately to blame? It is, as the old worthy says, something to trust our God in the dark, as the dog does his.

A dear and wise and exquisite child, drew a plan for a headstone on the grave of a favorite terrier, and she had in it the words "WHO died" on such a day; the older and more worldly-minded painter put in "WHICH;" and my friend and "Bossy's" said to me, with some displeasure, as we were examining the monuments, "Wasn't he a Who as much as they?" and wasn't she righter than they? and

"Quis desiderio sit aut pudor aut modus
Tam cari capitis"--

as that of "Rab."

With regard to the quotations--and the much Latin and some Greek, the world of men, and especially of women, is dead against me. I am sorry for it. As he said, who was reminded in an argument that the facts were against him, "So much the worse for them," and I may add for me. Latin and Greek are not dead--in one sense, they are happily immortal; but the present age is doing its worst to kill them, and much of their own best good and pleasure.

23, RUTLAND STREET,
_October 13, 1859_.

_RAB AND HIS FRIENDS._

_To MY TWO FRIENDS
at Busby, Renfrewshire,
In Remembrance of a Journey from Carstairs Junction
to Toledo and back,
The Story of "Rab and his Friends" is inscribed._

Four-and-thirty years ago, Bob Ainslie and I were coming up Infirmary Street from the Edinburgh High School, our heads together, and our arms intertwisted, as only lovers and boys know how, or why.

When we got to the top of the street, and turned north, we espied a crowd at the Tron Church. "A dog-fight!" shouted Bob, and was off; and so was I, both of us all but praying that it might not be over before we got up! And is not this boy-nature? and human nature too? and don't we all wish a house on fire not to be out before we see it? Dogs like fighting; old Isaac says they "delight" in it, and for the best of all reasons; and boys are not cruel because they like to see the fight. They see three of the great cardinal virtues of dog or man--courage, endurance, and skill--in intense action. This is very different from a love of making dogs fight, and enjoying, and aggravating, and making gain by their pluck. A boy--be he ever so fond himself of fighting, if he be a good boy, hates and despises all this, but he would have run off with Bob and me fast enough: it is a natural, and a not wicked interest, that all boys and men have in witnessing intense energy in action.

Does any curious and finely-ignorant woman wish to know how Bob's eye at a glance announced a dog-fight to his brain? He did not, he could not see the dogs fighting; it was a flash of an inference, a rapid induction. The crowd round a couple of dogs fighting, is a crowd masculine mainly, with an occasional active, compassionate woman, fluttering wildly round the outside, and using her tongue and her hands freely upon the men, as so many "brutes;" it is a crowd annular, compact, and mobile; a crowd centripetal, having its eyes and its heads all bent downwards and inwards, to one common focus.

Well, Bob and I are up, and find it is not over: a small thoroughbred, white bull-terrier, is busy throttling a large shepherd's dog, unaccustomed to war, but not to be trifled with. They are hard at it; the scientific little fellow doing his work in great style, his pastoral enemy fighting wildly, but with the sharpest of teeth and a great courage. Science and breeding, however, soon had their own; the Game Chicken, as the premature Bob called him, working his way up, took his final grip of poor Yarrow's throat,--and he lay gasping and done for. His master, a brown, handsome, big young shepherd from Tweedsmuir, would have liked to have knocked down any man, would "drink up Esil, or eat a crocodile," for that part, if he had a chance: it was no use kicking the little dog; that would only make him hold the closer. Many were the means shouted out in mouthfuls, of the best possible ways of ending it. "Water!" but there was none near, and many cried for it who might have got it from the well at Blackfriars Wynd. "Bite the tail!" and a large, vague, benevolent, middle-aged man, more desirous than wise, with some struggle got the bushy end of _Yarrow's_ tail into his ample mouth, and bit it with all his might. This was more than enough for the much-enduring, much-perspiring shepherd, who, with a gleam of joy over his broad visage, delivered a terrific facer upon our large, vague, benevolent, middle-aged friend,--who went down like a shot.

Still the Chicken holds; death not far _off_. "Snuff! a pinch of snuff!" observed a calm, highly-dressed young buck, with an eye-glass in his eye. "Snuff, indeed!" growled the angry crowd, affronted and glaring. "Snuff! a pinch of snuff!" again observes the buck but with more urgency; whereon were produced several open boxes, and from a mull which may have been at Culloden, he took a pinch, knelt down, and presented it to the nose of the Chicken. The laws of physiology and of snuff take their course; the Chicken sneezes, and Yarrow is free!

The young pastoral giant stalks off with Yarrow in his arms,--comforting him.

But the Bull Terrier's blood is up, and his soul unsatisfied; he grips the first dog he meets, and discovering she is not a dog, in Homeric phrase, he makes a brief sort of _amende_, and is off. The boys, with Bob and me at their head, are after him: down Niddry Street he goes, bent on mischief; up the Cowgate like an arrow--Bob and I, and our small men, panting behind.

There, under the single arch of the South Bridge, is a huge mastiff, sauntering down the middle of the causeway, as if with his hands in his pockets: he is old, gray, brindled, as big as a little Highland bull, and has the Shaksperian dewlaps shaking as he goes.

The Chicken makes straight at him, and fastens on his throat. To our astonishment, the great creature does nothing but stand still, hold himself up, and roar--yes, roar; a long, serious, remonstrative roar. How is this? Bob and I are up to them. _He is muzzled!_ The bailies had proclaimed a general muzzling, and his master, studying strength and economy mainly, had encompassed his huge jaws in a home-made apparatus, constructed out of the leather of some ancient _breechin_. His mouth was open as far as it could; his lips curled up in rage--a sort of terrible grin; his teeth gleaming, ready, from out the darkness; the strap across his mouth tense as a bowstring; his whole frame stiff with indignation and surprise; his roar asking us all round; "Did you ever see the like of this?" He looked a statue of anger and astonishment, done in Aberdeen granite.

We soon had a crowd: the Chicken held on. "A knife!" cried Bob; and a cobbler gave him his knife: you know the kind of knife, worn away obliquely to a point, and always keen. I put its edge to the tense leather; it ran before it; and then!--one sudden jerk of that enormous head, a sort of dirty mist about his mouth, no noise,--and the bright and fierce little fellow is dropped, limp, and dead. A solemn pause: this was more than any of us had bargained for. I turned the little fellow over, and saw he was quite dead; the mastiff had taken him by the small of the back like a rat, and broken it.

He looked down at his victim appeased, ashamed, and amazed; snuffed him all over, stared at him, and taking a sudden thought, turned round and trotted off. Bob took the dead dog up, and said, "John, we'll bury him after tea." "Yes," said I, and was off after the mastiff. He made up the Cowgate at a rapid swing; he had forgotten some engagement. He turned up the Candlemaker Row, and stopped at the Harrow Inn.

There was a carrier's cart ready to start, and a keen, thin, impatient, black-a-vised little man, his hand at his gray horse's head, looking about angrily for something. "Rab, ye thief!" said he, aiming a kick at my great friend, who drew cringing up, and avoiding the heavy shoe with more agility than dignity, and watching his master's eye, slunk dismayed under the cart,--his ears down, and as much as he had of tail down too.

What a man this must be--thought I--to whom my tremendous hero turns tail! The carrier saw the muzzle hanging, cut and useless, from his neck, and I eagerly told him the story, which Bob and I always thought, and still think, Homer, or King David, or Sir Walter alone were worthy to rehearse. The severe little man was mitigated, and condescended to say, "Rab, my man, puir Rabbie,"--whereupon the stump of a tail rose up, the ears were cocked, the eyes filled, and were comforted; the two friends were reconciled. "Hupp!" and a stroke of the whip were given to Jess; and off went the three.

* * * * *

Bob and I buried the Game Chicken that night (we had not much of a tea) in the back-green of his house in Melville Street, No. 17, with considerable gravity and silence; and being at the time in the Iliad, and, like all boys, Trojans, we called him Hector of course.

* * * * *

Six years have passed,--a long time for a boy and a dog: Bob Ainslie is off to the wars; I am a medical student, and clerk at Minto House Hospital.

Rab I saw almost every week, on the Wednesday; and we had much pleasant intimacy. I found the way to his heart by frequent scratching of his huge head, and an occasional bone. When I did not notice him he would plant himself straight before me, and stand wagging that bud of a tail, and looking up, with his head a little to the one side. His master I occasionally saw; he used to call me "Maister John," but was laconic as any Spartan.

One fine October afternoon, I was leaving the hospital, when I saw the large gate open, and in walked Rab, with that great and easy saunter of his. He looked as if taking general possession of the place; like the Duke of Wellington entering a subdued city, satiated with victory and peace. After him came Jess, now white from age, with her cart; and in it a woman, carefully wrapped up,--the carrier leading the horse anxiously, and looking back. When he saw me, James (for his name was James Noble) made a curt and grotesque "boo," and said, "Maister John, this is the mistress; she's got a trouble in her breest--some kind o' an income we're thinking'."

By this time I saw the woman's face; she was sitting on a sack filled with straw, her husband's plaid round her, and his big-coat with its large white metal buttons, over her feet.

I never saw a more unforgettable face--pale, serious, _lonely_,[2] delicate, sweet, without being at all what we call fine. She looked sixty, and had on a mutch, white as snow, with its black ribbon; her silvery, smooth hair setting off her dark-gray eyes--eyes such as one sees only twice or thrice in a lifetime, full of suffering, full also of the overcoming of it: her eyebrows black and delicate, and her mouth firm, patient, and contented, which few mouths ever are.

[2] It is not easy giving this look by one word; it was
expressive of her being so much of her life alone.

As I have said, I never saw a more beautiful countenance, or one more subdued to settled quiet. "Ailie," said James, "this is Maister John, the young doctor; Rab's freend, ye ken. We often speak aboot you, doctor." She smiled, and made a movement, but said nothing; and prepared to come down, putting her plaid aside and rising. Had Solomon, in all his glory, been handing down the Queen of Sheba at his palace gate, he could not have done it more daintily, more tenderly, more like a gentleman, than did James the Howgate carrier, when he lifted down Ailie his wife. The contrast of his small, swarthy, weather-beaten, keen, worldly face to hers--pale, subdued, and beautiful--was something wonderful. Rab looked on concerned and puzzled, but ready for anything that might turn up,--were it to strangle the nurse, the porter, or even me. Ailie and he seemed great friends.

"As I was sayin' she's got a kind o' trouble in her breest, doctor; wull ye tak' a look at it?" We walked into the consulting-room, all four; Rab grim and comic, willing to be happy and confidential if cause could be shown, willing also to be the reverse, on the same terms. Ailie sat down, undid her open gown and her lawn handkerchief round her neck, and without a word, showed me her right breast. I looked at and examined it carefully,-she and James watching me, and Rab eying all three. What could I say? there it was, that had once been so soft, so shapely, so white, so gracious and bountiful, so "full of all blessed conditions,"--hard as a stone, a centre of horrid pain, making that pale face, with its gray, lucid, reasonable eyes, and its sweet resolved mouth, express the full measure of suffering overcome. Why was that gentle, modest, sweet woman, clean and lovable, condemned by God to bear such a burden?

I got her away to bed. "May Rab and me bide?" said James. "_You_ may; and Rab, if he will behave himself." "I'se warrant he's do that, doctor;" and in slank the faithful beast. I wish you could have seen him. There are no such dogs now. He belonged to a lost tribe. As I have said, he was brindled and gray like Rubislaw granite; his hair short, hard, and close, like a lion's; his body thick set, like a little bull--a sort of compressed Hercules of a dog. He must have been ninety pounds' weight, at the least; he had a large blunt head; his muzzle black as night, his mouth blacker than any night, a tooth or two--being all he had--gleaming out of his jaws of darkness. His head was scarred with the records of old wounds, a sort of series of fields of battle all over it; one eye out, one ear cropped as close as was Archbishop Leighton's father's; the remaining eye had the power of two; and above it, and in constant communication with it, was a tattered rag of an ear, which was forever unfurling itself, like an old flag; and then that bud of a tail, about one inch long, if it could in any sense be said to be long, being as broad as long--the mobility, the instantaneousness of that bud were very funny and surprising, and its expressive twinklings and winkings, the intercommunications between the eye, the ear, and it, were of the oddest and swiftest.

Rab had the dignity and simplicity of great size; and having fought his way all along the road to absolute supremacy, he was as mighty in his own line as Julius Caesar or the Duke of Wellington, and had the gravity[3] of all great fighters.

[3] A Highland game-keeper, when asked why a certain terrier, of
singular pluck, was so much more solemn than the other dogs,
said, "Oh, Sir, life's full o' sairiousness to him--he just
never can get enuff o' fechtin'."

You must have often observed the likeness of certain men to certain animals, and of certain dogs to men. Now, I never looked at Rab without thinking of the great Baptist preacher, Andrew Fuller.[4] The same large, heavy, menacing, combative, sombre, honest countenance, the same deep inevitable eye, the same look,--as of thunder asleep, but ready,--neither a dog nor a man to be trifled with.

[4] Fuller was, in early life, when a farmer lad at Soham, famous
as a boxer; not quarrelsome, but not without "the stern
delight" a man of strength and courage feels in their
exercise. Dr. Charles Stewart, of Dunearn, whose rare gifts
and graces as a physician, a divine, a scholar, and a
gentleman, live only in the memory of those few who knew and
survive him, liked to tell how Mr. Fuller used to say, that
when he was in the pulpit, and saw a _buirdly_ man come
along the passage, he would instinctively draw himself up,
measure his imaginary antagonist, and forecast how he would
deal with him, his hands meanwhile condensing into fists,
and tending to "square." He must have been a hard hitter if
he boxed as he preached--what "The Fancy" would call "an
ugly customer."

Next day, my master, the surgeon, examined Ailie. There was no doubt it must kill her, and soon. It could be removed--it might never return--it would give her speedy relief--she should have it done. She curtsied, looked at James, and said, "When?" "To-morrow," said the kind surgeon--a man of few words. She and James and Rab and I retired. I noticed that he and she spoke little, but seemed to anticipate everything in each other. The following day, at noon, the students came in, hurrying up the great stair. At the first landing-place, on a small well-known blackboard, was a bit of paper fastened by wafers, and many remains of old wafers beside it. On the paper were the words,--"An operation to-day. J. B. _Clerk_."

Up ran the youths, eager to secure good places: in they crowded, full of interest and talk. "What's the case?" "Which side is it?"

Don't think them heartless; they are neither better nor worse than you or I; they get over their professional horrors, and into their proper work--and in them pity--as an _emotion_, ending in itself or at best in tears and a long-drawn breath, lessens, while pity as a _motive_, is quickened, and gains power and purpose. It is well for poor human nature that it is so.

The operating theatre is crowded; much talk and fun, and all the cordiality and stir of youth. The surgeon with his staff of assistants is there. In comes Ailie: one look at her quiets and abates the eager students. That beautiful old woman is too much for them; they sit down, and are dumb, and gaze at her. These rough boys feel the power of her presence. She walks in quickly, but without haste; dressed in her mutch, her neckerchief, her white dimity short-gown, her black bombazine petticoat, showing her white worsted stockings and her carpet-shoes. Behind her was James with Rab. James sat down in the distance, and took that huge and noble head between his knees. Rab looked perplexed and dangerous; forever cocking his ear and dropping it as fast.

Ailie stepped up on a seat, and laid herself on the table, as her friend the surgeon told her; arranged herself, gave a rapid look at James, shut her eyes, rested herself on me, and took my hand. The operation was at once begun; it was necessarily slow; and chloroform--one of God's best gifts to his suffering children--was then unknown. The surgeon did his work. The pale face showed its pain, but was still and silent. Rab's soul was working within him; he saw that something strange was going on,--blood flowing from his mistress, and she suffering; his ragged ear was up, and importunate; he growled and gave now and then a sharp impatient yelp; he would have liked to have done something to that man. But James had him firm, and gave him a _glower_ from time to time, and an intimation of a possible kick;--all the better for James, it kept his eye and his mind off Ailie.

It is over: she is dressed, steps gently and decently down from the table, looks for James; then, turning to the surgeon and the students, she curtsies,--and in a low, clear voice, begs their pardon if she has behaved ill. The students--all of us--wept like children; the surgeon happed her up carefully,--and, resting on James and me, Ailie went to her room, Rab following. We put her to bed. James took off his heavy shoes, crammed with tackets, heel-capt and toe-capt, and put them carefully under the table, saying, "Maister John, I'm for nane o' yer strynge nurse bodies for Ailie. I'll be her nurse, and I'll gang aboot on my stockin' soles as canny as pussy." And so he did; and handy and clever, and swift and tender as any woman, was that horny-handed, snell, peremptory little man. Everything she got he gave her: he seldom slept; and often I saw his small shrewd eyes out of the darkness, fixed on her. As before, they spoke little.

Rab behaved well, never moving, showing us how meek and gentle he could be, and occasionally, in his sleep, letting us know that he was demolishing some adversary. He took a walk with me every day, generally to the Candlemaker Row; but he was sombre and mild; declined doing battle, though some fit cases offered, and indeed submitted to sundry indignities; and was always very ready to turn, and came faster back, and trotted up the stair with much lightness, and went straight to that door.

Jess, the mare, had been sent, with her weatherworn cart, to Howgate, and had doubtless her own dim and placid meditations and confusions, on the absence of her master and Rab, and her unnatural freedom from the road and her cart.

For some days Ailie did well. The wound healed "by the first intention;" for as James said, "Oor Ailie's skin's ower clean to beil." The students came in quiet and anxious, and surrounded her bed. She said she liked to see their young, honest faces. The surgeon dressed her, and spoke to her in his own short kind way, pitying her through his eyes, Rab and James outside the circle,--Rab being now reconciled, and even cordial, and having made up his mind that as yet nobody required worrying, but, as you may suppose, _semper paratus_.

So far well: but, four days after the operation, my patient had a sudden and long shivering, a "groosin'," as she called it. I saw her soon after; her eyes were too bright, her cheek colored; she was restless, and ashamed of being so; the balance was lost; mischief had begun. On looking at the wound, a blush of red told the secret: her pulse was rapid, her breathing anxious and quick, she wasn't herself, as she said, and was vexed at her restlessness. We tried what we could. James did everything, was everywhere; never in the way, never out of it; Rab subsided under the table into a dark place, and was motionless, all but his eye, which followed every one. Ailie got worse; began to wander in her mind, gently; was more demonstrative in her ways to James, rapid in her questions, and sharp at times. He was vexed, and said, "She was never that way afore; no, never." For a time she knew her head was wrong, and was always asking our pardon--the dear, gentle old woman: then delirium set in strong, without pause. Her brain gave way, and then came that terrible spectacle,--

"The intellectual power, through words and things,
Went sounding on its dim and perilous way;"

she sang bits of old songs and Psalms, stopping suddenly, mingling the Psalms of David and the diviner words of his Son and Lord, with homely odds and ends and scraps of ballads.

Nothing more touching, or in a sense more strangely beautiful, did I ever witness. Her tremulous, rapid, affectionate, eager, Scotch voice,--the swift, aimless, bewildered mind, the baffled utterance, the bright and perilous eye; some wild words, some household cares, something for James, the names of the dead, Rab called rapidly and in a "fremyt" voice, and he starting up surprised, and slinking off as if he were to blame somehow, or had been dreaming he heard; many eager questions and beseechings which James and I could make nothing of, and on which she seemed to set her all, and then sink back ununderstood. It was very sad, but better than many things that are not called sad. James hovered about, put out and miserable, but active and exact as ever; read to her when there was a lull, short bits from the Psalms, prose and metre, chanting the latter in his own rude and serious way, showing great knowledge of the fit words, bearing up like a man, and dealing over her as his "ain Ailie." "Ailie, ma woman!" "Ma ain bonnie wee dawtie!"

The end was drawing on: the golden bowl was breaking; the silver cord was fast being loosed--that _animula blandula_, _vagula_, _hospes_, _comesque_, was about to flee. The body and the soul--companions for sixty years--were being sundered, and taking leave. She was walking alone, through the valley of that shadow, into which one day we must all enter,--and yet she was not alone, for we know whose rod and staff were comforting her.

One night she had fallen quiet, and as we hoped, asleep; her eyes were shut. We put down the gas, and sat watching her. Suddenly she sat up in bed, and taking a bed-gown which was lying on it rolled up, she held it eagerly to her breast,--to the right side. We could see her eyes bright with a surprising tenderness and joy, bending over this bundle of clothes. She held it as a woman holds her sucking child; opening out her night-gown impatiently, and holding it close, and brooding over it, and murmuring foolish little words, as over one whom his mother comforteth, and who sucks and is satisfied. It was pitiful and strange to see her wasted dying look, keen and yet vague--her immense love.

"Preserve me!" groaned James, giving way. And then she rocked back and forward, as if to make it sleep, hushing it, and wasting on it her infinite fondness. "Wae's me, doctor; I declare she's thinkin' it's that bairn." "What bairn?" "The only bairn we ever had; our wee Mysie, and she's in the Kingdom, forty years and mair." It was plainly true: the pain in the breast, telling its urgent story to a bewildered, ruined brain, was misread and mistaken; it suggested to her the uneasiness of a breast full of milk, and then the child; and so again once more they were together, and she had her ain wee Mysie in her bosom.

This was the close. She sank rapidly: the delirium left her; but, as she whispered, she was "clean silly;" it was the lightening before the final darkness. After having for some time lain still--her eyes shut, she said "James!" He came close to her, and lifting up her calm, clear, beautiful eyes, she gave him a long look, turned to me kindly but shortly, looked for Rab but could not see him, then turned to her husband again, as if she would never leave off looking, shut her eyes, and composed herself. She lay for some time breathing quick, and passed away so gently, that when we thought she was gone, James, in his old-fashioned way, held the mirror to her face. After a long pause, one small spot of dimness was breathed out; it vanished away, and never returned, leaving the blank clear darkness of the mirror without a stain. "What is our life? it is even a vapor, which appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away."

Rab all this time had been full awake and motionless; he came forward beside us: Ailie's hand, which James had held, was hanging down; it was soaked with his tears; Rab licked it all over carefully, looked at her, and returned to his place under the table.

James and I sat, I don't know how long, but for some time,--saying nothing: he started up abruptly, and with some noise went to the table, and putting his right fore and middle fingers each into a shoe, pulled them out, and put them on, breaking one of the leather latchets, and muttering in anger, "I never did the like o' that afore!"

I believe he never did; nor after either. "Rab!" he said roughly, and pointing with his thumb to the bottom of the bed. Rab leapt up, and settled himself; his head and eye to the dead face. "Maister John, ye'll wait for me," said the carrier; and disappeared in the darkness, thundering down-stairs in his heavy shoes. I ran to a front window; there he was, already round the house, and out at the gate, fleeing like a shadow.

I was afraid about him, and yet not afraid; so I sat down beside Rab, and being wearied, fell asleep. I awoke from a sudden noise outside. It was November, and there had been a heavy fall of snow. Rab was _in statu quo_; he heard the noise too, and plainly knew it, but never moved. I looked out; and there, at the gate, in the dim morning--for the sun was not up--was Jess and the cart,--a cloud of steam rising from the old mare. I did not see James; he was already at the door, and came up the stairs, and met me. It was less than three hours since he left, and he must have posted out--who knows how?--to Howgate, full nine miles off; yoked Jess, and driven her astonished into town. He had an armful of blankets, and was streaming with perspiration. He nodded to me, spread out on the floor two pairs of clean old blankets having at their corners, "A. G., 1794," in large letters in red worsted. These were the initials of Alison Graeme, and James may have looked in at her from without--himself unseen but not unthought of--when he was "wat, wat, and weary," and after having walked many a mile over the hills, may have seen her sitting, while "a' the lave were sleepin';" and by the firelight working her name on the blankets, for her ain James's bed.