In his last visit to his native Anstruther and its neighbourhood, in 1845, his unchanged and unchangeable affection for the scenes and friends of his youth showed a marvellous freshness and tenacity. Many are the stories of his pleasure in recalling memorials of the past. He hunted up an old schoolfellow, a tailor, and told him that he had been the first to acquaint him with the form of the earth. He congratulated another schoolfellow, who, like himself, had suffered from smallpox, that while other people’s faces were ’aye getting the waur, theirs were always getting the better o’ the wear!’ He sought out the place where Lizzie Green’s water-bucket used to stand, where he and his heated playfellows had often been allowed very kindly to slake their thirst. But most pathetic was his visit to the house of Barnsmuir. When he was some twelve or fourteen years old, the eldest daughter of that house had been in the habit of riding into Anstruther on a little pony, and Chalmers had conceived a deep and tender attachment to her, like that of Lord Byron for his Mary Duff. The young lady was married while he was at college, and she had died many years before this visit. At his special request her youngest sister met him at Barnsmuir. In the house, the remembrance of that early love came upon him with singular power; he asked respectfully about her life and death, and learned with deep emotion that she had died in the full Christian hope, and that some of his letters to her sister had soothed and comforted her. He then asked if there were any portrait of her, and being shown a profile, gazed on it with great earnestness, fixed his own card on the back of it, and, gazing on it again, gave expression to his strong affection, and burst into a flood of tears. It was a touching proof, as his biographer has said, that he was as much distinguished for the tenderness and tenacity of his attachments as for the brilliance of his gifts.