The Duke of Wellington and Lord Nelson. 175 
characteristic of that hardy constitutional energy which had led 
the Duke to persist in fulfilling an engagement through all diffi- 
culties and at all hazards, that when Mr. Butler invited him to 
alight and warm himself he declined the invitation with thanks, 
observing that he was very well as he was; though at the same 
time another gentleman, who was travelling in the carriage with 
him, very gladly accepted the invitation. 
Mr. Butler further informed me that there was no traffic on the 
road for at least twenty-four hours after the Duke had thus made 
his way through. 
a 

GHE following incident in the life of the first Lord Nelson, 
—C GIB Ah which has never, I believe, appeared in print, has not the same 
local claim toa place in your Magazine; and yet as his sister, Mrs. 
Bolton, was connected by property and residence with Wilts, and 
further as our county contains the family estate and residence 
which his gallantry won as a reward from his country, the story 
_ is not altogether inappropriate in your pages. 
_ In the summer of 1856 I was staying at Felixstow on the 
_ Suffolk coast, when there was living at Ipswich a very aged man, 
_ Abraham Cook, who was then a pensioner of H. M. Customs in 
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3 
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_ which he had served for thirty years, and who in early life had been 
_ yalet to the father of Lord Nelson at the Rectory of Burnham- 
i thorpe: he related the following circumstance. The father of Lord 
Nelson had been in the habit of spending his winters at Bath in 
4 the latter part of his life; and it was there that after Lord Nelson 
had taken leave of his father before setting out for Copenhagen, 
z he turned round to this Abraham Cook, and slipping a five pound 
‘note into his hand said, “Cook, mind you take good care of my 
father whilst I am away.” 
Now your readers may remember that one of the first, if not the 
first of Lord Nelson’s acts of daring as exhibited in a painting in 
the hall of Greenwich Hospital, portrays him as a young Midshipman 
in pursuit of a bear on the ice of the north sea, and that it is 
; recorded of him that when he was remonstrated with on the mad- 
ness of his act, he accounted for it by saying, “oh, I thought his 
