It was while the prosperous career of the great publishing firm was arrested by this disastrous event that a more dire calamity extended its effects far and wide. A leading Edinburgh publisher, writing to me shortly after the death of William Nelson, remarked: “I need not say to you what a true, large-hearted man he was. Do you remember when their printing-house was totally destroyed, and one would have thought his own immense losses would have frozen his sympathy for other sufferers? Yet he was one of the earliest subscribers of £1,000 to the victims of the Glasgow Bank; and so far did his kindly nature long to help them, he even refused at first to discountenance the project of a state lottery on their behalf!” Their sufferings had been brought home to him in the most moving form. A letter found among his papers after his death, endorsed in touching simplicity, “Poor fellow!” is the plea of an old schoolmate for failing to appear at a High School anniversary dinner. “I have to ask you to accept my apology,” he writes, “which you will readily do when I mention that I am one of the unfortunate victims of the City of Glasgow Bank; and _to-day_ I have received the liquidator’s final call for payment on the 22nd inst., which, I fear, will be total ruin to me.” William Nelson’s local associations were strong; they attached him with passionate love to his native city. Its very stones were dear to him. Every nook and corner of it associated with his own early years, with school and schoolmates, or with the later incidents of his business career, retained a hold on his sympathies. “I send you a photograph of Edinburgh from the Castle,” he writes to an old friend beyond the Atlantic, “that it may keep you in mind of the dear old city.” Hence the abrupt close of the Hope Park epoch, and the transfer to the new quarters at Parkside, awoke feelings wholly apart from those which the pecuniary loss involved. The sense of strangeness in the new locality is noticeable in more than one of his private memoranda, as in the following record of time and place: “This is the first memorandum I have written in the new room in Parkside. I came to it at a quarter to eleven o’clock on Friday, July 16, 1880. Dr. and Mrs. Wilson are at present staying with us.” Curiously, it is not till upwards of two years later that the memorandum occurs of the kindling of the Parkside hearth, thus: “Fire lighted in grate in my room here for the first time, November 13, 1882.”