Rab and His Friends | Page 2

that are true and of good report afterwards in their
turn,--still there is a pleasure, one of the strangest and strongest in our
nature, in imaginative suffering with and for others,--
"In the soothing thoughts that spring Out of human suffering;"
for sympathy is worth nothing, is, indeed, not itself, unless it has in it
somewhat of personal pain. It is the hereafter that gives to
"the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still,"
its own infinite meaning. Our hearts and our understandings follow
Ailie and her "ain man" into that world where there is no pain, where
no one says, "I am sick." What is all the philosophy of Cicero, the
wailing of Catullus, and the gloomy playfulness of Horace's variations
on "Let us eat and drink," with its terrific "for," to the simple faith of
the carrier and his wife in "I am the resurrection and the Life"?
I think I can hear from across the fields of sleep and other years Ailie's
sweet, dim, wandering voice trying to say,--

Our bonnie bairn's there, John, She was baith gude and fair, John, And
we grudged her sair, John, To the land o' the leal.
But sorrow's sel' wears past, John, The joys are comin' fast, John, The
joys that aye shall last, John, In the land o' the leal.
EDINBURGH, 1861.
[Illustration: a cherub]
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
Portrait, Dr. John Brown . . . . . . . Frontispiece.
Rab . . . . . . . . Hermann Simon
"He is muzzled!". . . . . Hermann Simon
"He lifted down Ailie his wife" . . . Edmund H. Garrett
"One look at her quiets the students" . . Edmund H. Garrett
"Rab looked perplexed and dangerous" . . Hermann Simon
"--And passed away so gently" . . Edmund H. Garrett
"Down the hill through Auchindinny woods" Edmund H. Garrett
Rab and Jess . . . . . . Hermann Simon

RAB AND HIS FRIENDS.
Four-and-thirty years ago, Bob Ainslie and I were coming up Infirmary
Street from the 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