William Nelson A Memoir 14

William Nelson A Memoir 14

Art had ever a charm for William Nelson, and he watched with jealous

sensitiveness the memorial statues which adorn the streets and squares

of his native city. But a keen personal sympathy gave intensity to his

interest in the one to be erected in honour of his own brother-in-law.

The execution of it was ultimately intrusted to Mr. C. Bell Birch,

A.R.A.; and in February 1884 Mr. Nelson thus writes from London to Mr.

James Campbell:--“I am here for a short time, with Mrs. Nelson and my

daughter Florence. We have all been out this afternoon at the studio of

Mr. Birch, the sculptor, seeing the model of the statue that is to be

erected to the memory of poor George Brown. I am glad to say that we are

all of opinion that the statue will be a noble one, though we are not

quite sure if the likeness will be what can be called a speaking

likeness.” The statue did ultimately satisfy in this respect, and now

forms an attractive feature in the Queen’s Park at Toronto. As to the

love of art here referred to, it is perpetuated by the younger

generation. Salisbury Green has its own studio, where both modelling and

painting were pursued by a group of young artists with more than

ordinary amateur skill. But art has found other rivals in the new home

to which the fair critic of Mr. Birch’s model has transferred her

_penates_.

 

As time wore on, and the thick clustering black locks of early years

whitened with the frosts of time, William Nelson courted more than ever

his own family reunions, delighted to gather his friends about him, and

noted with tender regrets the blanks that death made in the old circle.

Thus he writes to me in January 1882: “Several weel kent faces have

fled wi’ the year that’s awa’, including old artist-friends who have

recently disappeared from our midst that you will mourn.” After

referring to William Brodie and Sir Daniel Macnee, he proceeds: “And now

I have to inform you that your old friend William Miller [the eminent

engraver] has been called away, he having died at Sheffield yesterday. I

met him not long ago in the Meadows, as he was going in the direction of

Millerfield; and he walked as erect as he ever did, which was a most

remarkable thing for a man only four years short of being a

nonagenarian. In addition to those I have mentioned as having joined the

majority, the name of Sheriff Hallard has to be added; and Edinburgh has

lost in him a great deal of happy sunshine.”

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER IX.

 

_GLIMPSES OF TRAVEL._

 

 

Reference has already been made to William Nelson’s love of travel. It

was indeed a passion with him, which, with his persistent eagerness for

the minutest information on all points brought under his notice, might

under other circumstances have won a place for him among distinguished

travellers.

 

During a delightful sojourn which I shared with him in the Vale of

Yarrow in 1880, a special object of pilgrimage was the ruined cottage in

which the African traveller, Mungo Park, was born; and as he looked on

it he recalled the picture, by Sir George Harvey, representing the

fainting traveller in the African desert revived by the sight of a

little flower that seemed to tell of the divine hand, and renewed his

faith in the fatherhood of God. He followed up the subject, recovered an

original sketch map executed by the traveller of his intended second

route, of which he had a copy made; and among the letters preserved by

him is one from Dr. Anderson of Selkirk, in which it is stated:--“Park

served his apprenticeship for a surgeon with my grandfather in this

house (Dove Cot) where I now live, and where my grandfather, my father,

and myself have practised for more than a hundred years. My father

served his apprenticeship with Park in Peebles, when he practised there

before going off on his second journey. There stands a very handsome

tree in front of my house, a horse-chestnut, which was planted by the

traveller while courting his intended wife.”

 

African travel had a peculiar fascination for William Nelson. The return

of the venerable missionary, Dr. Robert Moffat, from his life-long

labours among the Hottentots and Bechuanas, awakened in him the

liveliest interest; and his son-in-law, Livingstone, was an object of

special veneration. When the startling news of Stanley’s meeting with

him at Ujiji was reported, it greatly excited and gratified him. And

when Mr. Henry M. Stanley visited Edinburgh on his return from Africa,

he received a hearty welcome at Salisbury Green. Keith Johnston, another

of the explorers of the Dark Continent, who fell a victim to the deadly

climate, was the son of an old friend. He watched with interest the news

of his early efforts, and tenderly mourned his fate. The same summer in

which the ruined cottage in the Vale of Yarrow was the object of William

Nelson’s curious interest, he had as his guest at Salisbury Green Mr.

Joseph Thomson, then recently returned from his exploratory wanderings

in previously unvisited regions to the south of the Victoria Nyanza, and

gratified his intelligent curiosity, plying him with questions about the

strange land and its people.

 

His own wanderings extended beyond the ordinary routes of the tourist.

He visited Norway and Sweden on more than one occasion; travelled in

Denmark and Russia, through Spain, Morocco, and Algiers; journeyed, as

we have seen, in Palestine; explored Egypt and the Nile; crossed the

American continent to the Pacific; and was on the eve of an extended

visit to Greece and Asia Minor when his active life came to a close. His

correspondence is voluminous, and supplies ample details of his

experience on successive journeys; but a few illustrations will suffice

for needful glimpses of personal characteristics. His journey across the

American continent in 1870 has already been referred to. The Yosemite

Valley, and the wonders of the Yellowstone Region, are now familiar to

tourists; but at that date they were recently discovered and little

known. He landed at New York on the 18th of May, had the excitement of a

threatened Indian raid as they traversed the territory of the Sioux, but

reached the Rocky Mountains in safety. He passed through the defiles of

the mountains with unexpected ease; and then he notes: “If the passage

of the Rocky Mountains has been easy, this has been made up by the

crossing of the Sierra Nevada in California, which is the most

difficult task in railway engineering that has yet been undertaken.

These mountains are between eight and nine thousand feet high, and over

these the railway passes, the roadway being in many places cut out of

solid rock, with perpendicular walls of many hundred feet deep, falling

straight down from the very edge of the railway.” The famous Yosemite

Valley he describes as “a valley of about twelve miles in length by two

in breadth, that has apparently been formed by the ground sinking down

to a depth of some three or four thousand feet, and leaving

perpendicular cliffs all round. In these are many fine waterfalls, the

largest being no less than two thousand six hundred feet high;” and

after a minute description of its features, he pronounces the valley to

be “one of the greatest wonders of the world.” The Indians were a

subject of unfailing interest. He longed to see the aborigines in their

genuine condition of savage simplicity; and at a later date, when

referring to this subject in a letter to Captain James Chester of the

3rd U.S. Artillery, he says:--“I send you a cutting from the _Times_. We

all know that the Scotch are a practical people; but I never before, in

all my reading, met with an instance of their getting the credit for

goaheadness in the way referred to. The Marquis of Lorne, while

Governor-General of Canada, was on the look-out for the genuine native;

and some of his first experiences, as he travelled beyond the frontiers

of civilization, are thus described by a correspondent who accompanied

him:--‘We begin to-morrow with an address from some Indians at Little

Current, on Manitoulin Island, who ought to be real, full-blooded

Indians, if any faith can be put in Indian names. But probably little

faith can be put in them. The mixture of races has been carried

on,--more especially by the Scotch, always foremost in everything,--with

so much energy that it is never easy to know whether an Indian is

full-blooded, or, as some stranger to the laws of orthography and

pronunciation tersely phrased it, “half Ingin, half Ingineer.” In one of

his speeches Lord Lorne told us of his once expressing a wish to see a

real, full-blooded Indian, his first; and being rather astonished when

the Canadian who undertook to gratify his wish summoned the required

real specimen of the aboriginal race by shouting, “Come here,

MacDonald.”’”

 

The Falls of Niagara had no such fresh wonder as belonged to the

newly-discovered marvels of California; but familiarity does not lessen

their effect, and the impression produced on Mr. Nelson’s mind is worth

reproducing in his own words. He travelled in company with Mrs. Nelson,

and he thus writes:--“One misses the true height of the falls at

first--one hundred and sixty-three feet--owing to looking down upon them

as they plunge into a deep gorge, in addition to their great extent in

breadth. But still the impression is overpowering. Before dinner we went

on to Goat Island, which divides the Horse Shoe, or Canadian Fall, from

the American Fall; got over to the Three Sisters--three lovely wooded

islands anchored amid the roar of waters--and then looked up the great

rapids from the head of Goat Island. This I really think almost finer

than the actual falls. There is no hill or rising ground visible. The

flat shore scarcely seems to reach above the water’s brink; and here is

a great tumbling flood that looks as if it came right out of the sky,

and was going to sweep everything before it. After dinner we crossed the

ferry, right under the falls, and formed a more definite idea of their

height. We then found our way to a spot on the Canadian side above the

falls, where we looked down on the Horse Shoe Fall. It has eaten its way

back into the rock; and an old residenter on the spot told us it has

greatly changed since he remembered it. It now looks as though the whole

mighty flood were poured into a narrow cleft, and disappears in a rising

cloud of vapour, in which, when the sun is shining, there is a constant

rainbow.”

 

At Toronto attractions of a different, but not less acceptable, kind

awaited him. He started for the backwoods, and fished in Lake Muskoka

with his old school-mate for his guide. And on his return to Toronto, a

party of the fellow-students of early years met at dinner under his

present biographer’s roof. Sir Andrew Ramsay, the head of the

Geographical Survey of Great Britain, chanced to be on a visit to

Canada; Alexander Sprunt had come on from North Carolina to place his

son at the University of Toronto; the Hon. George Brown, his own

brother-in-law, was now a Senator of the Dominion; the Hon. David

Christie was Speaker of the Senate; Professor George Paxton Young, and

their host, were both members of the Faculty of the Provincial

University; and thus, after an interval of more than forty years, the

memories of school and college life were recalled, and old times lived

over again, with many a humorous reminiscence, and some amusing

gleanings from the record of school-mates. In a letter to his sister he

says: “You may imagine with what delight I met so many of my old

school-fellows, and how we did talk over the days of auld lang syne!”