While the boys were disporting themselves on the Castle Hill and Arthur’s Seat, without a care for the future, their father was grappling with the first difficulties inevitable to the innovator on the prescriptive usages of the book-trade. But whatever may have been the obstacles encountered by him, there was no grudging expenditure in the educational advantages provided for his sons. At the school of Mr. William Lennie, and subsequently at that of Mr. George Knight, then second to none in Edinburgh, and afterwards at the High School, William Nelson pursued his earlier studies; and there, too, some of the friendships were formed which he cherished with all the warmth of his sympathetic nature to the close of life. It was in those early days, at Mr. Knight’s school, that the friendship was formed with his present biographer, along with George Wilson, subsequently Professor of Technology in the University of Edinburgh, with Dr. Philip Maclagan, and with William and James Sprunt, two young West Indians, the former of whom will reappear as British Consul in North Carolina. Of the more romantic career of the latter an account is happily preserved in the notes of an address by William Nelson at one of the gatherings of old schoolmates in later years, which were so congenial to his tastes. After telling of James Sprunt’s first settlement in the island of St. Vincent among a dissolute set of West Indians, his quitting it for New Orleans, and being lost sight of for years, he thus proceeds:--“He had landed penniless; but when his old father and mother got their first letter from him, it was an invitation for them to join him there and share his good fortune. He next appears as rector of a classical academy at Wilmington, North Carolina, where he became a clergyman and pastor of the Presbyterian Church; and when the war broke out between the North and South, he cast in his lot with the latter, marched with the Wilmington brigade into action, and as an army chaplain, under General Stonewall Jackson, went through the terrible scenes of strife and carnage in that bloody civil war, utterly regardless of danger, and even ready to face death at the call of duty. His popularity with his Wilmington congregation was not lessened, it may be believed, when he returned to resume his pastoral charge at the close of the war.” Of other boys of those first school-days may be noted Dr. J. A. Smith, in later years an active member of the Royal Society, and Secretary of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland; Dr. John Knight, the son of our old teacher; the Rev. James Huie of Wooler, Northumberland, and others, who formed themselves into “The Juvenile Society for the Advancement of Knowledge,” of which an account is given in the Memoir of George Wilson by his sister.