Among stray waifs that have survived from those old days is a letter, bearing date February 20, 1829, addressed to the secretary of the Juvenile Society by the elder brother of one of its members. With all the condescension of an undergraduate placing his mature knowledge at the service of schoolboys, the writer sets forth “the very great pleasure I take in hearing of the proceedings of your society, and my unqualified approbation of your plan of keeping a journal as a sort of record of your proceedings.” He proceeds: “I daresay you are unaware that the duties of a student of medicine are of a very arduous nature.” But, as he goes on to state, he had laid before the Plinian Society in the previous summer a paper on certain “Discoveries made behind Edinburgh Castle in digging the foundation of the new bridge,”--part of the terraced road which involved the destruction of Trotter’s Close and the Nelson homestead,--and this, he says, “I shall copy out in a style which I hope will prove interesting to my young friends, and which may, perhaps, form a contribution to their journal.” The writer, whose seniority, by the years that separate the College student from the High School boy, entitled him thus condescendingly to address his brother Philip and the other juvenile _savants_, is now Sir Douglas Maclagan, the genial veteran Professor of Medical Jurisprudence in his own university; and, it may be added, the author of some of the most popular of a younger generation’s student-songs. At a later stage the juvenile debaters awoke to an interest in the stirring questions of the day. Mr. Alexander Sprunt, writing from Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1859, says: “During the period of our High School curriculum, questions were occupying the public mind, and startling events taking place in Europe: the final struggle of the Poles, the French ‘Three Days of July,’ the reform movement, etc. The subject of the immediate or gradual emancipation of the negro slaves in the colonies was also keenly discussed about that time. Some of us, being related to families of the colonists, were familiar with the arguments for a gradual abolition of slavery.” William Nelson took up the question warmly, and was an uncompromising advocate for immediate emancipation. As to the oft-renewed struggle in France between Bourbon Royalists, Imperialists, and Red Republicans, it was forcibly brought home to the realization of the young debaters by the presence of the exiled Charles X. and his little court at Holyrood; and by the occasional sight of the royal refugee as he passed the High School Yards on foot, in company with one or two of his suite, to enjoy the magnificent panorama from the Calton Hill.