saddened him; but
neither illness, nor his poignant anxiety
for others, could sour
a nature so unselfish. He appeared not to have
lost that anodyne and consolation
of religious hope, which had been the strength of his forefathers,
and was his best inheritance from a remarkable race of Scotsmen.
Wherever he came, he was welcome; people felt glad when they had
encountered him
in the streets--the streets of Edinburgh, where almost every one
knows
every one by sight--and he was at least as joyously received by the
children and the dogs as by the grown-up people of every family.
A friend has kindly shown me a letter in which it is told how Dr.
Brown's love of dogs, his
interest in a half-blind old Dandy which was attached to him, was
evinced in the very last hours of his life. But enough has been said,
in general terms, about the character of "the beloved
physician," as Dr. Brown was called in Edinburgh, and a brief account
may be given, in some detail, of his life and ways. Dr. John
Brown was born in Biggar, one of the gray, slaty-looking little towns
in
the pastoral moorlands of southern Scotland. These towns have no
great beauty that
they should be admired by strangers, but the natives, as Scott said
to Washington Irving, are attached to their "gray hills," and to the
Tweed, so beautiful where man's greed does not pollute it, that the
Border people are
all in love with it, as Tyro, in Homer, loved the divine Enipeus. We
hol