ABSTRACT
Drawing on the recollections of a seventeen-year professional and personal association, Marjorie Hope Nicolson wrote this sagacious portrait of William Allan Neilson after his death in 1945. It seemed to the author natural and right that the obituary notices of Neilson, even in metropolitan dailies and weeklies, should have been personal and lively rather than formal. Perhaps some had been written in advance for the ' 'morgue' by men or women who had known him; others must have been compiled at the last moment from records, for his death was unexpected. Neilson was a lowlander, and it both amused and touched me to see that sometimes he was on the defensive with highlanders. When he was appointed to the Smith presidency, many of his academic colleagues wagged their heads, saying that he was a professor and not a businessman. Neilson surprised them, as he amazed his trustees.
