The study, as at Berwick, was upstairs, and was a large lightsome room, from which a view of the Craigmillar woods, North Berwick Law, and even the distant Lammermoors, could be obtained--a view which was, alas! soon blocked up by the erection of tall buildings. At the back of the house, downstairs, was the sitting-room, where the family meals were taken and where William sat working at his desk. He had been fortunate enough to secure, almost immediately after his arrival in Edinburgh, a commission from Messrs. A. & C. Black to prepare the Index to the ninth edition of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, then in course of publication. During the twelve years that the work lasted he performed the possibly unique feat of reading through the whole of the twenty-five volumes of the Encyclopaedia, and thus added considerably to his already encyclopaedic stock of miscellaneous information. Opening off the sitting-room was a smaller room, or rather a large closet, commanding one of the finest views in Edinburgh of the lion-shaped Arthur's Seat; and here of an evening he would sit in his chair alone, or surrounded by the friends who soon began to gather about him, "And smoke, yea, smoke and smoke." Sometimes a more than usually resounding peal of laughter would bring the professor down from his study to find out what was the matter, and to join in the merriment; and then, after a few hearty words of greeting to the visitors, he would plead the pressure of his work and return to the company of Justin or Evagrius. His three nephews, who during the Edinburgh period were staying in town studying for the ministry, always spent Saturday afternoon at Spence Street, and sometimes a student friend would come with them. Dr. Cairns was usually free on such occasions to devote an hour or two to his young friends. He was always ready to enter into discussions on philosophical problems that happened to be interesting them, and the power and ease with which he dealt with these gave an impression as of one heaving up and pitching about huge masses of rock. His part in these discussions commonly in the end became a monologue, which he delivered lying back in his chair, with his shoulders resting on the top bar of it, and which he sometimes accompanied with the peculiar jerk of his right arm habitual to him in preaching. A _snell_ remark of his brother William suggesting some new and comic association with a philosophic term dropped in the course of the discussion, would bring him back with a roar of laughter to the actual world and to more sublunary themes. When the young men rose to leave he always accompanied them to the front door, and bade each of them good-bye with a hearty "[Greek: Panta ta kala soi genoito],"[17] and an invariable injunction to "put your foot on it,"--"it" being the spring catch by which the gate was opened. [Footnote 17: "All fair things be thine."]