208 BRITISH BIRDS. [vol. x. 



love and admiration, declaring him to have been one of "the 

 cleverest and one of the most perfect gentlemen he had ever 

 known." Nelson became head boy at this school, and the 

 Head Master would have had him take Holy Orders but the 

 boy had no wish for this though he remained a thorough 

 Churchman. He took up the Law as a profession— and then, 

 before he came of age, illness struck him down and left such 

 injury to his heart that he received the sentence, as he stood 

 on the threshold of a life full of promise, that he must abandon 

 his career, live more or less as an invalid, quit his home, and 

 leave the hills and woods, where he had already developed his 

 love of nature and of bird life All this was a most bitter trial, 

 but he took up his cross and bore it with inspiring cheer- 

 fulness. Neither these trials, nor the loss of his two brothers 

 in early life, to one of whom he was devotedly attached, nor 

 yet the death of his only baby boy, impaired his courage or 

 changed his happy nature. The doctor's order that he must 

 live on level ground brought him to Redcar. He found him- 

 self in a richer field of observation and study, and thence- 

 forward he proceeded with his work in a more scientific way. 

 Redcar and the Teesmouth were then ideal stations for an 

 ornithologist. 



The terrible changes which have impaired the natural 

 chaims of the Yorkshire coast had yet to come. I myself 

 as a boy have played alone on beaches where now thousands 

 of trippers throng, when seals still basked in the Teesmouth ; 

 down the coast naked cliffs rose upright out of the sea, further 

 south high and lonely moors " ran out " on the lofty edges 

 of the iron-bound shore. Through some forty years Nelson 

 sailed over the waters, walked the mud flats and the links, 

 visited the nesting places of the sea fowl or went inland to 

 the mountains, valleys, meres, tarns, streams and woods 

 of Yorkshire, seeing, remembering and noting all. 



Towns now smother the old fishing villages, hotels stand 

 on the slopes and heights, mine shafts open on the cliffs, and 

 locomotives shriek along what was the coastguards' and 

 sailors' " trod." Nelson came in from his last walk to the 

 South Gare for once depressed, and saying that all was ruined 

 by the new steel works and defences. The immediate future 

 has worse in store for those who loved that neighbourhood 

 " as it was." There is some compensation in the thought 

 that he will not look out to sea to find furnace smoke blotting 

 the blue divide between sea and water, nor wander on a slag- 

 strewn strand, nor walk among the soot-grimed grass across 

 the familiar sandhills. 



