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When he entered the University of Edinburgh, James Clerk Maxwell still occasioned some concern to the more conventional amongst his friends by the originality and simplicity of his ways. His replies in ordinary conversation were indirect and enigmatical, often uttered with hesitation and in a monotonous key. While extremely neat in his person, he had a rooted objection to the vanities of starch and gloves. He had a pious horror of destroying anything—even a scrap of writing paper. He preferred travelling by the third class in railway journeys, saying he liked a hard seat. When at table he often seemed abstracted from what was going on, being absorbed in observing the effects of refracted light in the finger-glasses, or in trying some experiment with his eyes—seeing round a corner, making invisible stereoscopes, and the like. Miss Cay used to call his attention by crying, “Jamsie, you're in a prop.” He never tasted wine; and he spoke to gentle and simple in exactly the same tone. On the other hand, his teachers—Forbes above all—had formed the highest opinion of his intellectual originality and force; and a few experienced observers, in watching his devotion to his father, began to have some inkling of his heroic singleness of heart. To his college companions, whom he could now select at will, his quaint humour was an endless delight. His chief associates, after I went to the University of Glasgow, were my brother, Robert Campbell (still at the Academy), P. G. Tait, and Allan Stewart.
That part of the old estate of Middlebie which remained to the heirs of Maxwell was situate on the right or westward bank of the Water of Orr, or Urr, in Kirkcudbrightshire, about seven miles from Castle-Douglas, the market-town, ten from Dalbeattie, with its granite quarries, and sixteen from Dumfries. It consisted chiefly of the farm of Nether Corsock, and the moorland of Little Mochrum. But, before building, Mr. Clerk Maxwell by exchange and purchases had added other lands to these, including the farm of Upper Glenlair. The site chosen for the house was near to the march of the original estate, where a little moor-burn from the westward falls into the Urr. The two streams contain an angle pointing south-east, opposite the heathery brae which hides the village of Kirkpatrick Durham. There, on a rising ground above the last descent towards the river and the burn, a mansion-house of solid masonry, but of modest dimensions, had been erected. It was built of dark-gray stone, with a pavement and a “louping-on-stane” of granite before the front door. On the southward slope, towards the burn, was a spacious garden-ground and a plantation beyond it, occupying the den or dingle on either side the burn, and coming round to westward of the house and garden, where it ended in a shrubbery, by which the house was approached from the north. On the eastward slope, towards the Water of Urr, was a large undivided meadow for the “kye” and the ponies.