FARRAGO VIT^E cxv 



where, those who knew him well enough to love him, loved him 

 well. And he, upon his side, liked a place where a dinner 

 party was not of necessity uiiintellectual, and where men stood 

 up to him in argument. 



The presence of his old classmate, Tait, was one of his early Col- 

 attractions to the chair ; and now that Fleeming is gone again, Iea 8 ues - 

 Tait still remains, ruling and really teaching his great classes. 

 Sir Kobert Christison was an old friend of his mother's ; Sir 

 Alexander Grant, Kelland and Sellar, were new acquaintances 

 and highly valued ; and these too, all but the last, have been 

 taken from their friends and labours. Death has been busy in 

 the Senatus. I will speak elsewhere of Fleeming's demeanour 

 to his students ; and it will be enough to add here that his rela- 

 tions with his colleagues in general were pleasant to himself. 



Edinburgh, then, with its society, its university work, its Farrago 

 delightful scenery and its skating in the winter, was thenceforth 

 his base of operations. But he shot meanwhile erratic in many 

 directions : twice to America, as we have seen, on telegraph 

 voyages ; continually to London on business ; often to Paris ; 

 year after year to the Highlands to shoot, to fish, to learn reels 

 and Gaelic, to make the acquaintance and fall in love with the 

 character of Highlanders ; and once to Styria, to hunt chamois 

 and dance with peasant maidens. All the while, he was pursu- 

 ing the course of his electrical studies, making fresh inventions, 

 taking up the phonograph, filled with theories of graphic repre- 

 sentation ; reading, writing, publishing, founding sanitary asso- 

 ciations, interested in technical education, investigating the laws 

 of metre, drawing, acting, directing private theatricals, going a 

 long way to see an actor a long way to see a picture ; in the 

 very bubble of the tideway of contemporary interests. And all 

 the while he was busied about his father and mother, his wife, 

 and in particular his sons ; anxiously watching, anxiously 

 guiding these, and plunging with his whole fund of youthfulness 

 into their sports and interests. And all the while he was him- 

 self maturing not in character or body, for these remained 

 young but in the stocked mind, in the tolerant knowledge of 

 life and man, in pious acceptance of the universe. Here is a 



