It was a pleasure just to sit beside him, and to meet his pleasantness with cheerful chat, gay banter, or affectionate earnestness.
For every body loved him.

Women, of course, did; they could not help it; but men were drawn to him likewise, with the sort of reverential tenderness that they would feel toward a suffering child or woman-- and something more--intense respect.

His high sense of honor, his true manliness, attracted the best of all the notabilities then constituting that brilliant set; and there was not one of them worth having for a friend at all who was not, in greater or less degree, the friend of the Earl of Cairnforth.
But there was another side of his Edinburg life which did not appear till long after he had quitted Modern Athens forever--nor even then fully; not until he had passed quite away from the comments of this mortal world.

Then, many a struggling author, or worn-out professional man, to whom life was all up-hill, or to whom sudden misfortune had made the handful of "siller" (i.e."silver") a matter of absolute salvation to both body and soul--scores of such as these afterward recalled hours or half hours spent in the cozy study in Charlotte Square, beside the little figure in its chair--outwardly capable of so little, yet endowed with both the power and will to do so much.

Doing it so generously, too, and withal so delicately, that the most sensitive went away with their pride unwounded, and the most hardened and irreligious were softened by it into thankfulness to One higher than their earthly benefactor, who was only the medium through whom the blessings came.
These were accidental offices, intermingled with the principal duty which the earl had undertaken, and which he carried out with unremitting diligence--the care of his old friend's children.