58 ALEXANDER WILSON : POET-NATURAUST 



fact that Wilson was never seriously in love, but 

 we see how untrue this is when we remember his 

 unsuccessful affair in Scotland and read the really- 

 pathetic letters referring to this second woman, 

 whose image he declared "no time nor distance can 

 ever banish" from his mind. We are to find, how- 

 ever, that he was less constant than he thought and 

 was to leave a fair sweetheart to mourn him after his 

 death. We hear nothing more of the episode which 

 caused his departure from Milestown. During the 

 time that he lived at Milestown, Wilson accom- 

 plished on foot the journey of nearly eight hundred 

 miles to Ovid, New York, to assist William Duncan 

 in the arrangement of his affairs there. So unfail- 

 ing was he in his devotion to his loved ones that 

 no exertion was ever too much for him to under- 

 take in their behalf. 



In Bloomfield Wilson resumed his interrupted 

 pedagogic duties at the rate of "12 s. per quarter 

 York currency" with thirty-five pupils, but from the 

 first he had no love for the place. The people were 

 more ignorant and even more superstitious than 

 those of Milestown, Even the belief in witches was 

 so prevalent that when a Dutch doctor declared that 

 the trouble with one of his patients was due to the 

 bewitchment of an old woman of the neighborhood, 

 the justice actually issued a warrant by the authority 

 of which she was dragged to the sick man's room 

 in order that he might tear her flesh with his nails 

 and so overcome the spell. Among such people as 

 this, there could be little that was agreeable to a man 

 of Wilson's temperament, so that his appointment to 

 the school near Gray's Ferry, Pennsylvania, came to 



