The recreations of each summer’s holiday alternated between foreign travel through unfamiliar scenes, and a sojourn in some choice centre of Scottish scenery and historical associations. But it was indispensable for William Nelson’s full enjoyment of either that it should be shared with Mrs. Nelson and his children. Indeed, the hints that occasionally transpire in his letters, of the pleasure with which he exchanged their summer resort for Salisbury Green and Parkside, show that he had been thinking far more of their happiness than his own. He liked his children to travel, and while they were still young repeatedly sent them abroad, either with a tutor and governess, or under the care of some trusted friend. He had a strong prejudice against Continental boarding-schools, and instead of sending his daughters to one, he preferred arranging for their spending successive winters abroad in charge of a friend, where they had the advantage of masters who came daily to them. The same feeling animated him in later years, alike in his plans for foreign travel, and in the choice of a summer haunt among favourite Scottish scenery. Of the latter, pleasant memories come back to me of many a ramble by the Tweed and its tributaries the Ettrick, the Leader, the Yarrow, and other haunted streams; and by St. Mary’s Loch, which has wooed alike the poets of elder and of modern times. A mere residence in the country, however attractive the scenery might be, speedily proved irksome to William Nelson. His active mind required constant occupation; and the physical impediments which increasing obesity, accompanied by a retarded action of the heart, interposed in the way of long pedestrian excursions, only led to a change in the methods of attaining the same end. He was ever on the look-out for some fresh and unfamiliar scene. In the summer of 1879 he made his way to St. Kilda, a curious little, outlying, ocean-girt rock of the Hebrides, the only one of a lonely group that is inhabited-- “Nature’s last limit, hemmed with ocean round.”