Autograph letter signed : Glasgow, to William Angus Knight, [1895?] January 7.

Expressing his pleasure at the news that Knight "...had undertaken to write Nichols' Memoirs. It must be an anxious & laborious piece of work, but no man is so well equipped for it as you are from your knowledge of & love for Nichol & capacity to give us an appreciative estimate of the man & his work. I am sorry to say that I have not preserved any letters of his, but even if I had, they w'd have been of no use to you, as my relations to him were never more than official. To tell the truth, & much to my own regret, N. & I never 'hit it off'. Early in my intercourse with him as a colleague, by some extraordinary misapprehension, the notion got into his head that I had in some way slighted him at our Senate meetings or elsewhere; & though I did my best to overcome this wholly imaginary impression, I never succeeded, & our intercourse all through his professorship here, was little more than formal. This being so, I would have been greatly surprised when he asked me to officiate at his wife's funeral, were it not that I had & had shown a great regard & esteem for her, & I think she had expressed a wish that I should be asked to fulfil this last sad duty. I am sorry that of late years we have seen so little of each other, - all the more that the years, for one of us, are not many in which the loss of the past can be retrieved. I am beginning to feel that the intellectual machine, never a very active one, is working more heavily & slowly than it used to do. I daresay to you, with your intense literary activity, this confession will seem a strange one. I have not lost, however, or begun to lose, my regard for old friends."