The fine timber-fronted tenement at the corner of the Bowhead, constructed mainly of oak, was a choice example of the burghers’ dwellings in Old Edinburgh, with their trading booths opening on the street. Similar front lands in the High Street were the abodes of the merchants and traders. The “Gladstone Land” still stands near by in the Lawnmarket, bearing the initials of Thomas Gladstone, a merchant of Edinburgh in the days of Charles I. and Cromwell, to whose gifted descendant the restoration of the City Cross is due. The old nobles and landed gentry, judges and advocates, preferred the retirement of the closes and wynds, some of which still retain the names of patrician occupants. In one of those antique dwellings, in Trotter’s Close, near the Bowhead, with its wainscotted chambers, painted panels, and other traces of older generations, the Nelson family resided in William’s youth. The narrow approach to it admitted of no other carriage than the old-fashioned sedan chair; but the house itself was commodious, though with curious complexities of internal adaptation to its confined neighbourhood. One large chamber was shelved round, and stored with the surplus productions of publishing enterprise for which the Bowhead establishment had no room; and its miscellaneous contents furnished a tempting resort for explorations into some strange fields of literature not ordinarily lying within the range of youthful studies. When at length the West Bow was invaded by civic reformers, the Nelsons removed to a more commodious house, the dwelling in an elder century of Lady Elizabeth, Duchess of Gordon, while the duke held the Castle for James II. The Gordon House on the Castle Hill was a fine example of the town mansions of the sixteenth century; and, owing to its elevated site, commanded a beautiful view from its southern windows, looking across the Grassmarket to Heriot’s Hospital, the Greyfriars’ Churchyard, and the distant range of the Pentland Hills. On its demolition, in 1887, William Nelson secured sundry interesting relics, including a landscape by James Norie, which filled a panel over the mantlepiece in the duchess’s drawing-room. He also carried off the stone gargoils, fashioned in the shape of cannons, which projected from under the south parapet; and they now adorn the river wall of the garden at St. Bernard’s Well, the restoration of which, as will be seen hereafter, constituted one of the public-spirited works on which he was engaged when his life drew to a close.