"Heaven gives us friends to bless the present scene;

Removes them, to prepare us for the next."

YOUNG (Night Thoughts).

CHAPTER TWELVE

O

F those who were at the Academy when I first went there, and whom I knew, there are few left. Probably the two most distinguished men in physical science were Clerk Maxwell and Peter Guthrie Tait. I can recall at that time hearing it said, in my father's house, that some work that Clerk Maxwell had done astonished by its power the savants of the day. He certainly proved himself later to be among the first-if not the firstof the men of science of the time. He was for many years the most quoted as an authority in what I read of physical science as an amateur. Peter Tait I knew well. When I was introduced to him many years after my schooldays, and when he had become Professor of Natural Philosophy in Edinburgh University, I said to him, "I have desired to meet you for a long time, that I might apologise to you for giving you a black eye." He stared and laughed, and I told him the story. When he was in the sixth class and I was in the second, on an occasion when there was snow in the yards, we little fellows took advantage of the big sixth-who had to go into class before our time-to set upon them, and to make believe we had driven them off the field. They took our onslaught good-naturedly. I, like an imp as I was, ran forward to deliver my last snowball on the retreating foe. Just as I aimed at Tait's back, he turned round, and my ball, which was slushy, and

which I had pressed as tight as I could, caught him straight in the eye, shot from a distance of a few feet. I was proud of myself, and he was certainly hurt pretty severely. He and I became good friends, and in the late Seventies I have played golf with him at St. Andrews at six in the morning, a time when no other player would turn out, and when no caddy thought it worth his while to get up so early to earn the fee of a round, so we had to carry our own clubs. His talk as we trod the green was quite interesting and most instructive. The good-natured way in which he tried to make things clear to the amateur was characteristic of the man. How proud he was of his son Freddy as a golfer. I cannot doubt that his sad death in the Boer war did much to bring Tait to his end.

Henry Smith, who became the head of the City of London Police, Colonel Cadell, V.C., Sir Colin Scott-Moncrieff, and Sir John Batty Tuke, who was Member for the Universities of Edinburgh and St. Andrews, were all class-fellows of mine. Scott-Moncrieff is one of the few men for whom prayer has been made in all the mosques of a district in Egypt. By his skilful and daring engineering work, he brought the blessing of irrigation water to a large tract of country, desolate before, and although he belonged to the hated race of "Christian dogs," gratitude overflowed in prayer to Allah in many a mosque for his welfare