|
Chronic rheumatism again bothered 68-year-old ELIZABETH (BARCLAY) WISHART on St. Valentine's Day as the gathering snowflakes fell outside their rural Scottish home in the mill-house four miles north of Drumlithie. The winter had been mild up till this time while worried English and Scottish farmers had been losing their valuable beeves and milkcows to a devastatingly widespread cattle plague progressing right up to the small WISHART acreage at New Mill on the stream named Carron Water. The rinderpest epidemic, or "steppe murrain," beginning in the Russian steppes was inadvertently imported with foreign livestock to London in 1865, and from there it had spread all over Britain. Only by destroying all the affected animals and those cattle with which they had come in contact could the catastrophe be arrested. ELIZABETH's erudite 64-year-old husband had kept others aware of the calamity's extent, and he had also been reading and hearing lately about the annoying desperado Irish Fenian movement making trouble in the U. S. and Canada. But ELIZABETH and WILLIAM were primarily pondering the well-being of their lone American son, and wondering where he could possibly be during that 1866 mid-winter day. Following a suggestion from their contemplative eldest child, James, a preacher in Liverpool, the concerned WILLIAM decided to ask JOHN TAYLOR to launch a newspaper advertisement in Kentucky, Illinois, or wherever necessary to locate young William, the namesake son with whom everyone had seemed to have lost contact. |
| Copyright © 2000 Dick Taylor All Rights Reserved |