He was a kind and humane master and soon caused a bitter feeling against himself among his slave holding neighbors by persisting in teaching his negroes to read and write and giving them religious instruction in defiance of a law then existing forbidding the teaching of negroes. He attempted to found a college at Palmyra, and had books shipped to him from the East. Upon opening one of the boxes, it was found that not being quite full of books, it had been filled with anti-slavery pamphlets, by some eastern man who knew his desires to educate and uplift the blacks. The knowledge of the receipt of the pamphlets spread like wild-fire among the slave holders, who determined to take his life. The Doctor was spirited away by his friends and hid in a cave, where he wrote the first chapter of his great work on “Infidelity,” while his enemies were scouring the country for him, with all of the roads guarded and every supposable means of escape cut off. His friends implored him to come to Quincy. Making his way through a heavy forest, he arrived at midnight on the west bank of the Mississippi River opposite Quincy, where John Burns and other friends were to meet him and row him across. While waiting at the edge of the forest for his friends to appear, with the wide sweeping river before him and the lights of Quincy on the opposite shore, he composed that beautiful hymn, “The Shining Shore”: My days are gliding swiftly by And I, a pilgrim stranger, Would not detain them as they fly, Those hours of toil and danger. Chorus. For Oh, we stand on Jordan’s strand, Our friends are passing over, And just before, the shining shore, We may almost discover. When Burns and his friends arrived with boats, they informed him that a number of infuriated slave holders were on the other side, determined to seize him and bring him back to Missouri. To avoid them, they rowed up the river twenty miles before crossing to Illinois, then quietly brought him down, overland, to Quincy. Several efforts were afterwards made to retake Doctor Nelson to Missouri, but John Burns and his loyal friends vigilantly guarded him until the bitter feeling subsided and died out. In Quincy Doctor Nelson established one of his four institutes to educate young men for Christian Missionaries, in which he spent all of his own means besides much money raised by him in the East. He died poor, at the age of fifty-one, and was buried in Woodland Cemetery, where friends have erected a large granite monument to his memory. He left only a daughter, a Mrs. Rose Clapp, who, if living, is now in California. One of John Burns’ daughters is in Quincy, Mrs. Schermerhorn. Miss Julia Burns, long a school teacher here, is now employed in the Treasury Department at Washington.