The afternoon he usually spent in visiting, and, so long as he remained in Berwick, there was no more familiar figure in its streets than his.  The tall, stalwart form, already a little bent,—­but bent, one thought, not so much by the weight of advancing years as by way of making an apology for its height,—­the hair already white, the mild and kindly blue eye, the tall hat worn well back on the head, the swallow-tail coat, the swathes within swathes of broad white neckcloth, the umbrella carried, even in the finest weather, under the arm with the handle downward, the gloves in the hands but never on them, the rapid eager stride,—­all these come back vividly to those who can remember Berwick in the Sixties and early Seventies of last century.  His visitations were still carried out with the method and punctuality which had characterised them in the early days of his ministry, and he usually arranged to make a brief pause for tea with one of the families visited.  On these occasions he would frequently be in high spirits, and his hearty and resounding laughter would break out on the smallest provocation.  That laugh of his was eminently characteristic of the man.  There was nothing smothered or furtive about it; there was not even the vestige of a chuckle in it.  Its deep “Ah! hah! hah!” came with a staccato, quacking sound from somewhere low down in the chest, and set his huge shoulders moving in unison with its peals.  The whole closed with a long breath of purest enjoyment—­a kind of final licking of the lips after the feast was over.

Returning to his house, he always entered it by the back door, apparently because he did not wish to put the servant to the trouble of going upstairs to open the front door for him.  It does not seem to have occurred to him to use a latch-key.  In the evening there was generally some meeting to go to, but after his return, when evening worship and the invariable supper of porridge and milk were over, he always went back to his study, and its lights were seldom put out until long past midnight.

Although his reading in these solitary hours was of course mainly theological, he always kept fresh his interest in the classical studies of his youth.  He did not depend on his communings with Origen and Eusebius for keeping up his Greek, but went back as often as he could find time to Plato and to the Tragedians.  Macaulay has defined a Greek scholar as one who can read Plato with his feet on the fender.  Dr. Cairns could fully satisfy this condition; indeed he went beyond it, for when he went from home he was in the habit of taking a volume of Plato or Aeschylus with him to read in the train.  One of his nephews, at that time a schoolboy, remembers reading with him, when on a holiday visit to Berwick, through the Alcestis of Euripides.  It may have been because he found it necessary to frighten his young relative into habits of accuracy, or possibly because an outrage committed against a Greek poet was to him the most horrid of