In Professor Pillans’s class he maintained the standing which he had achieved at the High School. His foremost but unequal rival in the composition of Latin verse was the late George Paxton Young, the esteemed Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in the University of Toronto. It was while William Nelson was still a student that John Cairns--the friend and fellow-student both at Edinburgh and Berlin of his younger brother, John Nelson, and now the venerable Principal and Professor of Systematic Theology in the Divinity Hall of the United Presbyterian Church--came fresh from the pastoral hills of Berwickshire to win for himself a distinguished place among the men of his time.
Amid the stimulus and rivalry of such competitors for fame, the young student devoted himself with renewed zeal to the classics, with undefined visions of some honourable professional or academic reward as his life-prize; and fulfilled the high anticipations of his earlier career. But while thus steadily pursuing a course which gave abundant promise of triumph, his father was suddenly prostrated by disease; and William, as the eldest son of a large family, abandoned all the bright prospects of his university career, and the dream of professional or academic achievements, to grapple with the unfamiliar difficulties of a commercial enterprise, till then conducted on a scale commensurate with the modest aims of an elder generation in the Old Town of Edinburgh.
The business of Mr. Thomas Nelson was a curious survival of the system borrowed from the great fairs of the Middle Ages, and grafted on to their older traffic by the successors of Guttenburg and Fust; of Caxton, Wynkin de Worde, and Chepman and Miller. Allan Ramsay had followed in their steps, with his booth at the sign of the Mercury, opposite the head of Niddry’s Wynd, from whence he transferred it to the Luckenbooths at the City Cross. It was in just such another luckenbooth at the Bowhead that Mr. Thomas Nelson originated the business which has since developed into such great proportions.
William Nelson threw himself at once, with characteristic singleness of aim, into his new vocation; nor did he ever express regret at his enforced desertion of scholarship for trade. But few men have carried away from school or college a keener sense of the attachments of student life. To the last the plea of an old schoolmate ever presented an irresistible claim which scarcely any demerit could cancel. The fate of one whose life, by his own misconduct, had closed in miserable failure is thus charitably noted in one of his letters: “Poor ---- died two days ago of congestion of the lungs; and it is a wonder that he hung on so long, as he has been in a very dilapidated condition for years. The last time I saw him, his condition was truly pitiable. I sent him a fresh bolster and bedding, for the ones he had were hard and foul. Poor fellow! he did a great deal to hasten the approach of the last enemy.” His loyalty to early friends was unfailing. He kept a record of his classmates in the High School, and noted with keenest interest their success or failure in life. He told with kindly humour of the refusal of a liberal “tip” offered to a porter at Cairo who had been specially serviceable, and then claimed fellowship by reminding him of old High School doings. B---- was the ne’er-do-weel of Mackay’s class, who had thus found his vocation in the land of the Pharaohs. His sympathy was unbounded in any honour or good fortune achieved by a schoolmate; and latterly, as he watched the rapidly diminishing numbers of the old group of school and college companions, he recorded at the close of each year the minutes of Death’s roll-call. To one who entered so keenly into academic life, and whose career was so replete with promise, it was a trying ordeal to abandon college for the uncongenial drudgery of a trading venture for which such experiences seemed to promise no helpful training. But in Scotland a university career is by no means regarded as unsuitable preparation for trade and commerce; and William Nelson was speedily to show what success the classical gold medalist of the High School and the best writer of Latin verse in the College could achieve in business life.