Principal Cairns | Page 8

sufficient confidence. He rarely
bestowed any praise. A grim smile of satisfaction, and sometimes a
"Very well, sir," were all that he would vouchsafe; but to others he
would be less reticent, and once he was heard to say, "I have so far
missed my own way, but John Cairns will flourish yet."
John is described as having been at this time a well-grown boy,
somewhat raw-boned and loose-jointed, with an eager look, ruddy and

healthy, and tanned with the sun, his hair less dark than it afterwards
became. He was fond of schoolboy games--shinty, football, and the
rest--and would play at marbles, even when the game went against him,
until he had lost his last stake. Archery was another favourite
amusement, and he was expert at making bows from the thinnings of
the Dunglass yews, and arrows tipped with iron _ousels_--almost the
only manual dexterity he possessed. Like all boys of his class, his usual
dress was a brown velveteen jacket and waistcoat and corduroy trousers
that had once been white.
Along with the teaching he got from Mr. M'Gregor, there went another
sort of education of a less formal kind which still deserves to be
mentioned. Now that he was earning a wage,--it was about eightpence
or tenpence a day,--which of course went into the common stock, he
ventured occasionally to ask his mother for sixpence to himself. With
this he could obtain a month's reading at the Cockburnspath library. A
very excellent library this was, and during the three years of his herding
he worked his way pretty well through it. It was especially strong in
history and standard theology, and in these departments included such
works as Gibbon's Decline and Fall, Mitford's History of Greece,
Russell's Modern Europe, Butler's Analogy, and Paley's Evidences. In
biography and fiction it was less strong, but it had a complete set of the
Waverley Novels in one of the early three-volume editions. When he
went to Mr. M'Gregor's, John used often to take butter churned by his
mother to the village shop, and the basket in which he carried it was
capacious enough to hold a good load of books from the library on the
return journey.
All the family were fond of books, and the small store of volumes,
mostly of old Scotch divinity, in the little bookcase at Dunglass was
well thumbed. But reading of a lighter kind was also indulged in, and
on winter nights, when the mother was plying her spinning-wheel and
the father had taken down his cobbler's box and was busily engaged
patching the children's shoes, it was a regular practice for John to sit
near the dim oil-lamp and read to the rest. Sometimes the reading
would be from an early number of Chambers's Journal, sometimes
from Wilson's Tales of the Borders, which were then appearing--both

of these being loans from a neighbour. But once a week there was
always a newspaper to be read. It was often a week or a fortnight old,
for, as it cost sixpence halfpenny, it was only by six or eight neighbours
clubbing together that such a luxury could be brought within the reach
of a working-man's family; but it was never so old as to be
uninteresting to such eager listeners.
But the most powerful of all the influences which affected John Cairns
at this period of his life remains to be mentioned--that which came to
him from his religious training and surroundings. The Christian religion
has acted both directly and indirectly on the Scottish peasantry, and it
has done so the more powerfully because of the democratic character of
the Presbyterian form which that religion took in Scotland. Directly, it
has changed their lives and has given them new motives and new
immortal hopes. But it has also acted on them indirectly, doing for
them in this respect much of what education and culture have done for
others. It has supplied the element of idealism in their lives. These lives,
otherwise commonplace and unlovely, have been lighted up by a
perpetual vision of the unseen and the eternal; and this has stimulated
their intellectual powers and has so widened their whole outlook upon
life as to raise them high above those of their own class who lived only
for the present. All who have listened to the prayers of a devout Scotch
elder of the working-class must have been struck by this combination
of spiritual and intellectual power; and one thing they must have
specially noticed is that, unlike the elder of contemporary fiction, he
expressed himself, not in broad Scotch but in correct and often stately
Bible English.
But this intellectual activity is often carried beyond the man in whom it
has first manifested itself. It tends to reappear in his children, who
either inherit it