I owed my acquaintance with the late Prof. Geikie to a chance meeting. Starting on a solitary walking-tour, in the summer vacation of the year 1878, I called at the Collingwood Arms, Cornhill, for tea, and found him there. He was not yet professor at that date, but was a member of H.M. Geological Survey, the work of which had brought him to Cornhill, where he was waiting for a train to Tweedmouth. He was then in the early prime of manhood, and his work being of a more active nature and taking him more into the open air, the cheery vigour which at all times characterised him was more pleasantly noticeable than ever. I remember that his beard, which he afterwards wore close-cropped, at that time descended over his chest and was of a golden colour. I believe that we began by talking of inns, for I remember that he poked some good-natured fun at the commercial travellers of those days (“bagmen,” as he perversely preferred to call them), and told me two or three amusing stories of experiences with them. But, ere long, we were talking of literature, and especially of poetry--the poetry of the day. Here was a delight for me! I was at the poetry-reading age, and had just left Cambridge, where I had primed myself with Swinburne, William Morris, the Rossettis--that is, with such of their works as had at that date appeared; and not only with these, but with such poems as the “Angel in the House,” “White Rose and Red,” “The Human Tragedy”: the works of lesser masters, then on their probation, and now, it may be, seldom heard of. Well, here in a wayside inn at the extremity of Northumberland, I had chanced upon an unknown traveller who had all these authors and books, so to speak, at his fingers’ ends. One would have liked, at that age, to pose him, to make some pedantical allusion, as to a matter of common knowledge, to something of which he had not happened to hear. But it was vain to hope to go beyond him. And, if we were fairly evenly matched in our discussion, it must be borne in mind that I was, as it were, staking my all in it, whilst he was merely gambling with his small change. For of course he never professed literature, but merely turned to it for a change of idea in hours that were not occupied by science. What was really remarkable in this conversation, I should say, was the readiness and whole-heartedness with which he threw himself into it, the stimulus given by his never-failing interest and occasional enthusiasm, the fine good-nature with which he unquestioningly put himself on equal terms with one who was many years younger than himself, and whose opinions, however confidently expressed, must often have been crude and immature. Neither then, nor at any subsequent time, was there anything whatever that was pedantic or academic about Geikie. When I met him next, I was approaching the middle term of life, but the recollection of that single conversation