Page:McClure's Magazine v9 n3 to v10 no2.djvu/37

Rh gift: he was so self-forgetting, so sympathetic, so brotherly, and there was about him such an atmosphere of the upper levels of life. "There are some men and women in whose company we are always at our best. While with them we cannot think mean thoughts or speak ungenerous words. Their mere presence is elevation, purification, sanctity. All the best stops in our nature are drawn out by their intercourse, and we find a music in our souls that was never there before." Such was Drummond himself in the closing months of his academic career.

Drummond knew, however, how to unbend from his strenuous seriousness. Nor could mere conventionalism deter him from giving outlet to his love of fun and adventure. After the close of their theological course, the members of the class met together in a hotel for a farewell supper. Alterations were going on in the hotel, and we were restrained in our mirth by the proximity of other guests in a part of the saloon curtained off. At Drummond's suggestion we resolved to adjourn outside the city altogether, to the solitudes of Arthur's Seat, where we should be untrammelled. Singing snatches of students' songs and Sankey's hymns by turn, we reached the summit of Arthur's Seat in the midnight hours, where, with the stars looking down on us and on the sleeping city which had nurtured our friendships, we heartened each other by song and speech for the unknown future that was awaiting us beyond the college walls.

During the winter of 1876-77, Drummond gathered round him several of his friends in the New College, and organized a series of Sunday evening meetings for students and other young men in the Gaiety Theater, opposite the Edinburgh University. Out of those meetings there grew up "a certain brotherhood, faithful in criticism, loyal in affection, tender in trouble," known to ourselves as the Gaiety brotherhood. The ten members, drawn