d it is hard to conceive
of a man less influenced by mercenary motives. His life was passed in a
perpetual war against veritable and undoubted evils; but unfortunately
his hotheadedness and want of tact prevented him from doing justice to
himself and his views. He lacked the calm intellect and patient temper
necessary to the successful fighting of life's stern battle, and had the
unhappy faculty of generally putting himself in the wrong, even when
there could be no doubt that he had originally been in the right. Some
of his letters to the newspapers were remarkable for nothing but their
indiscretion, violence and bad taste, and he came to be looked upon by
the landlords of Wiltshire as a visionary and dangerous man. His own
landlord, the Duke of Somerset, was of this way of thinking, and after
some remonstrances at second-hand which proved unavailing, his Grace
resolved that this "pestilent Scotchman" must be got rid of. A bill in
Chancery was filed against him on some pretext or other, with the view
of putting an end to his tenancy. Years of irritating and ruinous
litigation followed, the ultimate result of which was a decision in Mr.
Gourlay's favour. But it was the old story of _Jarndyce_ v. _Jarndyce_.
The protracted litigation had eaten up the substance of the successful
litigant, and upon the promulgation of the decree the Wiltshire Radical
was a ruined man. This would have been a matter of secondary importance
to the heir of a wealthy Fifeshire laird, but unhappily his father had
also come to the end of his resources. Injudicious speculation and the
mismanagement of an agent, combined with the necessity of placing a
large quantity of real estate in the market at an inauspicious time,
were the causes which led to the bankruptcy of the elder Gourlay, who
was stripped of his great possessions and left with a bare subsistence.
The son's prospects of inheriting a fortune were thus at an end, and at
thirty-seven years of age he found himself almost wholly without means,
and with a family of five children and a wife in delicate health
dependent upon him for support. The howl of the wolf began to be audible
to him; distant, as yet, but still gradually drawing nearer. To his
mind, a change of the base of his operations was clearly indicated.

Five years before this time he had acquired a block of land in the
Township of Dereham, in the County of Oxford, Upper Canada, where his
wife also owned some property. He now began to