Cairns

“ South-eastwards, a few miles along the coast, lay Berwick-on-Tweed, the scene of John Cairns's future labours as a minister; while away in the opposite direction, in the heart of the Lammermoors, near the headwaters of the Whitadder and the Dye, was the home of his immediate ancestors. These were tenants of large sheep-farms; but, through adverse circumstances, his grandfather, Thomas Cairns, unable to take a farm of his own, had to earn his living as a shepherd. ”

“ Outside the spheres of law and politics, Cairns’s only interest was in religion. He did not seem, although a good classical scholar and a competent 194 mathematician, to care either for letters or for science. But he was a Sunday-school teacher nearly all his life. Prayer-meetings were held at his house, at which barristers, not otherwise known for their piety, but believed to desire county court judgeships, were sometimes seen. ”

“ Meanwhile, in August 1867, Cairns became professor of apologetics in the United Presbyterian Theological Hall, retaining his charge at Berwick. His students testify to his zeal and success, especially recalling his insistence on the essential harmony between culture and reason. His numerous engagements impaired his strength, and in the autumn of 1868 he recruited on the continent, continuing the process next spring by a walking tour on the Scottish borders, and spending the following autumn in Italy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the fall of 1899, David Cairns, the youngest of the American war-correspondents, stood hungry and desolate in the plaza of the little town of Alphonso, two days' cavalry march below Manila—when Pack-train Thirteen arrived with provisions. The mules swung in with drooping heads and lolling tongues, under three-hundred-pound packs. The roars of Healy, the boss-packer, filled the dome of sky where a young moon was rising in a twilight of heavenly blue—dusk of the gods, indeed. ”

“ From the porthole of the ship’s corridor we looked straight into a mangrove swamp, beyond was a background of misty dark hills with heavy clouds rolling down them.
BARRON FALLS SCENERY AT CAIRNS.
Cairns, apart from its fame for the beauty of its falls and mountain scenery, is already an important place, and will become much more so, for it is the port for the rich inland districts, with which it is connected by railway. This fertile country is suitable for bananas, maize, for dairying, as well as for the timber trade. ”

“ A few weeks later he and his sister removed to Edinburgh, where they were joined in the autumn by their brother William. William Cairns, who had been schoolmaster at Oldcambus for thirty-two years, was in many respects a notable man. Deprived, as we have seen, in early manhood of the power of walking, he had set himself to improve his mind and had acquired a great store of general information. He was shrewd, humorous, genial, and intensely human, and had made himself the centre of a large circle of friends, many of whom were to be found far beyond the bounds of his native parish and county. ”

“ In the vicinity of Cairns are extensive sugar plantations, with sugar mills and refineries; the culture of coffee and tobacco has rapidly extended; bananas, pine-apples and other fruits are exported in considerable quantities and there is a large industry in cedar. The Barron Falls, among the finest in Australia, are near Kuranda, 19 m. from Cairns. Cairns became a municipality in 1885. ”

“ Yet if in this respect Cairns failed to reach a level worthy of his splendid intellect, the defect was due not to any selfish view of his own interest, but rather to the narrowness of the groove into which his mind had fallen, and to the atmosphere of Orange sentiment in which he had grown up. As a politician he is already beginning to be forgotten; but as a judge he will be held in honourable remembrance as one of the five or six most brilliant luminaries that have adorned the English bench since those remote days [29] in which the beginning of legal memory is placed. ”

“ Cairns returned to the University in the late autumn of 1837, enrolling himself in the classes of Latin, Greek, and Logic. Although he maintained his intimacy with his uncle's family, he now went into lodgings in West Richmond Street, sharing a room with young William Inglis, son of the minister at Stockbridge, then a boy at the High School. Here is the description he gives to his parents of his surroundings and of the daily routine of his life: "The lodging which we occupy is a very good room, measuring 18 feet by 16 feet, in every way neat and comfortable. ”

“ In 1877 Cairns, as a sort of reparation, appointed Lord Chelmsford's son, Alfred Henry Thesiger [q. v.] , a lord-justice of the appeal court. On the defeat of the conservatives at the general election, Cairns resigned with Mr. Disraeli, and after Lord Derby's death (23 Oct. 1869) led the opposition in the House of Lords. His resistance to the disestablishment of the Irish church was vigorous and tenacious. ”

“ Cairns and he were warmly attached to one another, and he was his minister's right-hand man in everything that concerned the good of the congregation.
It will readily be believed that Dr. Cairns had not been suffered to remain in Berwick during all these years without strong efforts being made to induce him to remove to larger spheres of labour. As a matter of fact, he received in all some half-dozen calls during the course of his ministry from congregations in Edinburgh and Glasgow ”

“ These heaps are precisely what in Scotland are called Cairns. This hill is accessible only by one very narrow and difficult path. They assured me that there was abundance of water on the summit at all seasons, and that the huts built by the Madina people were still standing on the summit, though out of repair.
At eleven o'clock crossed a stream, like a mill stream, running North. We halted on the East side of it; found that one of the asses with a load of beads had not come up. The soldier who drove it (Bloore) , without acquainting any person, returned to look for it. ”

“ The Cairns family now entered on a period of migration of this kind, and in the course of eleven years they flitted no less than six times. Their first removal was from Ayton Hill to Oldcambus Mains, in the parish of Cockburnspath, where they came into touch with the Dunglass estate and the Stockbridge Church, with both of which they were in after-years to have so close a connection. The father had been engaged by the Dunglass factor to act, in the absence of a regular tenant, as joint steward and shepherd at Oldcambus, and the family lived in the otherwise unoccupied farmhouse. ”

“ But Cairns had reassured them, and, as it were, thrown them into Emmie’s arms.
“My lads,” said Cairns, “don’t you worry about her being a woman. Take it from me, she has more grit than half a dozen ordinary men.” ”

“ Cairns, or barrows, in the druidical ages, were large heaps of stones raised over the bodies of deceased heroes. After the introduction of Christianity, similar piles were placed on malefactors, to give a sort of counteraction to the old custom; and it soon became the bitterest wish a man could give his enemy, “that a cairn might be his monument.”
[349] In Dugdale’s Monasticon, the signature Godricus Duxi occurs twice among the witnesses to two charters granted by king Canute.
[351] The distance from Ross to Chepstow, in a straight line, is not more than sixteen miles and a half ”

“ During the first five years of his ministry at Berwick, as we have seen, Cairns devoted himself entirely to his work in Golden Square. He must learn to know accurately how much of his time that work would take up, before he could venture to spend any of it in other fields. ”

“ In the other long cairn, which was opened in 1792, a similar chamber enclosed both urns and human bones. Various other cairns still remain unopened in the same district; and many of equal magnitude are to be met with in different parts of the country. The well-known antiquary, Mr. Joseph Train, furnishes an interesting account of several remarkable cairns in the parish of Minniegaff, Kirkcudbrightshire. One of these, called Drumlawhinnie, on the moor of Barcly, measures 891 feet in circumference. ”

“ Cairns was saying an hour afterward. "You used to talk to me a great deal about Nantucket—about the houses in Lily Lane, the little heads about the table, and how you walked by, watching hungrily like a night-bird—peering in at simple happiness. I couldn't forget that, and I told Bedient—how you loved Nantucket. One night at the club, he said: 'Buy one of those houses, David, and let her find out some summer morning slowly—that it is hers—and watch her face.' Then he suggested that we both come over here to see about it. ”

“ Cairns and Denis Quirk were working post haste in "The Mercury" office. "We must make 'The Mercury' a go-ahead, up-to-date paper," said Cairns.
"That's it, my man," replied Denis Quirk.
"We want to consider our readers' amusements," said Cairns.
"Tickle them, and make them laugh, and they will put their arms round the old 'Mercury's' neck and love her," cried Denis.
"Racing is the first and most important amusement in Australia. You need a sporting editor."
"Good old Cairns! With you and Tim O'Neill I have the finest stuff in Victoria. A sporting editor you shall have, sonny. ”

“ The chronology of the peculiar chambered cairns of South-Western Scotland is somewhat perplexing. On the one hand the structure of the cairns is presumptive evidence that they were built in neolithic times (J. Anderson, Scotland in Pagan Times,—the Bronze and Stone Ages, pp. 271-2; Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., xxxvi, 1902, p. 136) ; the successive interments which were made in them were characteristic of the same period (ib., p. 134) ; the pottery which they contained is almost all of neolithic type (ib., pp. 165-7; xxxviii, 1904, pp. 78-9) ”

“ The cairn has been almost levelled, but the ring of stones remains.
The Cnoc was a rounded, sugar-loaf mound of earth, and the Duma was a similar mound raised over a kistvaen.
The Cairn or Carn was a mere pile of stones, generally made over a grave, but sometimes having no immediate connection with one. Here is a curious [174] passage which will explain why some cairns contain no interments:—
"The plunderers started from the coast, and each man took with him a stone to make a carn, for such was the custom of the Fians when going to plunder or war. ”

“ And as for your serial, well, Major Cairns is dead, he won't mind.'
'No, but his aunts will. Their name is Cairns. As regards the sale, perhaps you and the other lawyers can stop it. Very well, either you promise or I go home and . . . perhaps there'll be a fire to-night and perhaps there won't. I'm fully insured.'
'By Jove!' Bastable looked at her critically. Cairns had been a lucky man. 'Well, Mrs Ferris,' he added, 'we're not used to troublesome customers like you. [Pg 289] I don't suppose the furniture is valuable, is it?'
'Oh, a couple of hundred,' said Victoria dishonestly. ”

“ But Cairns was no mere preacher and teacher. He put out his full strength as truly in his pastoral work as in his work for and in the pulpit. He visited his large congregation statedly once a year, offering prayer in each house, and hearing the children repeat a psalm or portion of Scripture which he had prescribed the year before. He timed these visits so accurately that he could on one occasion banter one of his elders on the fact that he had received more than his due in one year, because the last visitation had been on the 1st of January and this one was on the 31st of December. ”

“ Having discovered that Cairns was squeezable Victoria felt more hopeful as to the future. She was his only luxury and made the most of his liking for jewellery and furs. She even hit upon the more ingenious experiment of interesting Barbezan Soeurs in her little speculations. The device was not novel: for a consideration of ten per cent these bustling dressmakers were ready to provide fictitious bills and even solicitor's letters couched in frigidly menacing [Pg 246] terms. Cairns laughed and paid solidly. He had apparently far more money than he needed. Victoria was almost an economy ”

“ John Cairns was born at Ayton Hill, in the parish of Ayton, in the east of Berwickshire, on the 23rd of August 1818.
The farm of Ayton Hill no longer exists. Nothing is left of it but the trees which once overshadowed its buildings, and the rank growth of nettles which marks the site of a vanished habitation of man. ”

“ A few years earlier a new manse had been secured for the minister. This manse is the end house of a row of three called Wellington Terrace. These stand just within the old town walls, which are here pierced by wide embrasures. They are separated from the walls by a broad walk and a row of grass-plots, alternating with paved spaces opposite the embrasures, on which cannon were once planted. The manse faces south, and is roomy and commodious. When Dr. Cairns moved into it, he had an elderly servant as his housekeeper, of whom he is said to have been not a little afraid ”

“ But it appears to have been the favourite and most distinguished sepulchral memorial of the aboriginal races, throughout the whole three periods into which archæologists divide the long era prior to the revolutions effected by Roman civilisation and the introduction of Christianity. Cairns are either still found, or are known to have existed, in nearly every parish of Scotland. Many of these have been works of great labour, being regularly built of stones of considerable size, and approaching more to the character of a constructive pyramid, than of a mere stone tumulus or heap. ”