"Ah, then punctuality's the word. Be late and be nothing." He came down to the front door with me, his leghorn flapping, his sash-ends trailing on the stairs. There were volcanic salutations to portraits which we had missed when going up. I said good-bye to the Grand Old Man of Scotland. "Good-bye," said he, "and dinna forget--Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe, and the Apostle Paul--my heroes!" In the gathering dusk I descended the steps, as he stood in the open doorway, singing, and gazing towards the Corstorphine Hill. {96} CHAPTER VIII LORD KELVIN He sat on the lower stair, near the front door of his house, making difficult calculations and strange diagrams in a little book bound in green morocco. It would be five minutes before the carriage started, and he recollected that fact just as he reached the door and had put on his overcoat. Another man, almost any other, would have idled while the five minutes passed, and most men, especially busy men, would have fussed nervously at having to wait when they were ready. But Lord Kelvin, being the busiest of men, never wasted time by fussing, and never lost it in idling. Having five minutes he would solve a problem, so he pulled the memorandum book from his coat pocket, where he always carried it, and sat on the stair and worked. He was seventy then, but his spirits were as young as those of the youngest of his students. They say that a man is as old as his arteries. The saying might have originated with him, if it ever occurred to him that he had arteries. But I am not sure that the customary anatomy was not, in his case, reinforced by an ingenious system of electrical conductors through which a mysterious energy was driven by {97} his dynamic mind. Like all great teachers he was ever learning. But it would be difficult to say when he began to learn, for he was only ten years old when he entered the university! And he was thoroughly equipped for entering upon his student work even at that age. At twenty-two he was appointed Professor of Natural Philosophy, and he held that professorship for the rest of his life! Lord Kelvin was the greatest master of natural science in the nineteenth century. The twentieth century has not, thus far, produced his superior. He was born in 1824, he died in 1908. It was my privilege to know him during the last fifteen years of his life. A kinder man, one more considerate of the abysmal ignorance of the fellow creatures with whom he came into contact, could not be imagined. He was a plain Scotsman without a pose, without even a Scottish pose, and it would be difficult, maybe impossible, to find a better embodiment of life than that. Scottish he was, though born in Ireland. And his fame was associated with that of Glasgow University which had the honour of receiving him into student life and which received the greater honour of his distinguished services for a period almost as long as the psalmist allots to the life of a man.