He carried off one of the highest honours, and in 1864 entered the University of Aberdeen. It is, or was, the ambition of every hopeful youth in the North to wear the student's gown. "Oh that God would spare me to wear the red cloakie!" said John Duncan, afterwards the well-known Professor of Hebrew in the New College, Edinburgh, when weakened by an early illness. The life of the Aberdeen student has never, perhaps, been rendered with sufficient fidelity, save in "Alec Forbes," and Dr. Walter Smith's "Borland Hall," and it may have changed in some respects since Elmslie's time. Then it was emphatically a period of plain living and hard work. Eight shillings a week sufficed to cover many a student's expenses for board and lodging, amounting to less than £10 for the twenty weeks of the session, and the summer was spent at home. The spirit of the place was democratic in the extreme. There were a few students who came out of wealthy families, but any claim to respect on this ground would have been fiercely resented. George Macdonald tells of an aristocrat among the students condemned and sentenced by a meeting presided over by "the pale-faced son of a burly ploughman." The high spirits of youth would at times break out in coarse and even ferocious excesses, but these were rare, and the characteristic of the place was a limitless persistency of application. Most of the men felt that this was their one chance. If they could distinguish themselves, there were scholarships to be had which would open the path to Oxford or Cambridge, or give them a fair chance in other fields of life. Some yielded to temptation, and became wrecks; others, after a period of obscuration, recovered themselves; a few soon abandoned the quest for University honours, and busied themselves with other lines of reading and study; but Elmslie set himself, without flinching or turning aside, to his task. Evil did not lure him. There was no stamp of moral _défaillance_ on that clear brow. His watchful parents were still with him, for they set up another home in Aberdeen, and were constantly with their children. It ought, perhaps, to be mentioned that Elmslie's father was an enthusiastic total abstainer, in days when the practice was quite unfashionable, and in many parts of the country entirely unknown. In this his son warmly sympathised, maintaining the principle of abstinence to the end of his life, and carrying out the practice even during his studies in Germany. He wrote home, when assistant in Regent Square, "Glad you are getting on so famously in the temperance line, and do hope it will have a permanent and wide influence." But the secret of his University success was his indefatigable labour at the prescribed tasks. Although he might well be termed _l'esprit soudain_, he was capable of the long-continued and daily application which belongs to the rare union of ardour and patience. He had the characteristic of his countrymen—nothing could