The shrine of his favourite healing fountain had been restored to far more than its pristine beauty, and the generous benefactor to whom the work was due had himself been “called hence,” when the convener of the Cockburn Association wrote: “What Mr. William Nelson undertook he did well and thoroughly; and so long as Edinburgh citizens look down upon the valley of the Water of Leith, his work at St. Bernard’s Well will keep his memory green in their hearts.” But, as his letters show, other and still more extensive and costly restorations engaged William Nelson’s practical liberality, and continued to be objects of deepest interest to him till the close of his life. So early as 1847, attention had been recalled, in the “Memorials of Edinburgh in the Olden Time,” to the fact that the ancient hall of the palace in the Castle still existed, though so defaced and overlaid by later transmutations as to have passed out of knowledge of the living generation. But the matter was once more forgotten till near the close of 1883, when Lord Napier and Ettrick published in the _Scotsman_ an account of his explorations above the modern ceiling of the hospital ward, where, “on creeping up a ladder, through a trap-door, he found himself in a maze of mighty beams, on which the dust of centuries lay thick and soft.” It was the fine old open timbered ceiling, of carved chestnut, of the great hall of the Castle. Public attention was now keenly awakened to the interest of this historic relic. Here was the _aula Castri_, or great hall of the Castle, where there is little doubt the Scottish Parliament assembled in 1437 to inaugurate the reign of the young king, James II. Here, too, if the legend is to be accepted as a verity, only two years later Chancellor Crichton had the fatal symbol of the bull’s head served up for the Earl of Douglas. It was here that Charles I. held his coronation banquet in 1633, and that Argyle entertained the Lord Protector Cromwell in 1650. Of the historic worth of the ancient hall there could be no question; and not only its degradation to the purposes of a garrison hospital, but the general neglect and disfigurement of the Castle, had long been a subject of public complaint.