Burns— Alexander Wilson. 85 



named place before moving to Bloomfielrl, New Jersey, which 

 held him only a few months. 



Wilson had formed plans ,for the acquisition of some land, 

 and in September, 1T!>8, Duncan set out to examine the 

 country lying- between the Seneca and Cayuga lakes, in New- 

 York. He walked the distance in eight days and remained 

 there nearly a week, finding the soil surprisingly rich, the sit- 

 uation healthy and the game abundant. Wilson determined to 

 become a farmer and arranged with hisi former employer, Col. 

 Sullivan, for the purchase of 100 acres uncleared ground at 

 $5.00 an acre on the border of Seneca Lake in Ovid township, 

 Cayuga county, and the nephew began burning down the tim- 

 ber the succeeding spring. Wilson made one trip to the place 

 about ISOO, but sooner than be exposed to the ague, he decided 

 to retiirn to his desk, and the occasional vacation jobs at sur- 

 veying he was able to secure. His nephew Alexander, and 

 later his sister. Mrs. Duncan, and her younger children, 

 arrived and found an asylum on the farm. Her husband, Wil- 

 son accuses four years later, of cohabiting with guilt, poverty 

 and infamy in Ireland, after transporting a most promising 

 family to a foreign country. He says : " I have no doubt the 

 lash of remorse has already severely punished his unparalled 

 inhumanity, and I wish never to see him." To the sorely dis- 

 couraged nephews at Ovid, he writes cheerful letters and sends 

 all the money he can scrape together. In a letter to his 

 namesake, Alexander Duncan, he says: "An old weaver is a 

 poor, emaciated, helpless being, shivering over rotten yarn 

 and groaning over his empty flour barrel. An old farmer 

 sits in his arm chair before his jolly fire, while his joists are 

 crowded with hung beef and gammons, and the bounties of 

 Heaven are pouring into his barns." But his town bred 

 nephews longed for the city life and it required the utmost 

 tact to keep theni on the place even temporarily. 



Nowhere in history has Wilson employed his descriptive pow- 

 ers to better advantage than in his "Foresters." It is not alto- 

 gether a dreary waste of words, but whether he could have spent 

 his time more profitably in writing a sim])le prose narrative of 



