Audubon and his Journals, Volume 1 (of 2). John James Audubon

17 and others stared at my drawings of birds at that time.

      So industrious were Mr. Best and I that in about six months we had augmented, arranged, and finished all we could do for the museum. I returned to my portraits, and made a great number of them, without which we must have once more been on the starving list, as Mr. Best and I found, sadly too late, that the members of the College museum were splendid promisers and very bad paymasters.

      In October of 1820 I left your mother and yourselves at Cincinnati, and went to New Orleans on board a flat-boat commanded and owned by a Mr. Haromack. From this date my journals are kept with fair regularity, and if you read them you will easily find all that followed afterward.

      In glancing over these pages, I see that in my hurried and broken manner of laying before you this very imperfect (but perfectly correct) account of my early life I have omitted to tell you that, before the birth of your sister Rosa, a daughter was born at Henderson, who was called, of course, Lucy. Alas! the poor, dear little one was unkindly born, she was always ill and suffering; two years did your kind and unwearied mother nurse her with all imaginable care, but notwithstanding this loving devotion she died, in the arms which had held her so long, and so tenderly. This infant daughter we buried in our garden at Henderson, but after removed her to the Holly burying-ground in the same place.

      Hundreds of anecdotes I could relate to you, my dear sons, about those times, and it may happen that the pages that I am now scribbling over may hereafter, through your own medium, or that of some one else be published. I shall try, should God Almighty grant me life, to return to these less important portions of my history, and delineate them all with the same faithfulness with which I have written the ornithological biographies of the birds of my beloved country.

      Only one event, however, which possesses in itself a lesson to mankind, I will here relate. After our dismal removal from Henderson to Louisville, one morning, while all of us were sadly desponding, I took you both, Victor and John, from Shippingport to Louisville. I had purchased a loaf of bread and some apples; before we reached Louisville you were all hungry, and by the river side we sat down and ate our scanty meal. On that day the world was with me as a blank, and my heart was sorely heavy, for scarcely had I enough to keep my dear ones alive; and yet through these dark ways I was being led to the development of the talents I loved, and which have brought so much enjoyment to us all, for it is with deep thankfulness that I record that you, my sons, have passed your lives almost continuously with your dear mother and myself. But I will here stop with one remark.

      One of the most extraordinary things among all these adverse circumstances was that I never for a day gave up listening to the songs of our birds, or watching their peculiar habits, or delineating them in the best way that I could; nay, during my deepest troubles I frequently would wrench myself from the persons around me, and retire to some secluded part of our noble forests; and many a time, at the sound of the wood-thrush's melodies have I fallen on my knees, and there prayed earnestly to our God.

      This never failed to bring me the most valuable of thoughts and always comfort, and, strange as it may seem to you, it was often necessary for me to exert my will, and compel myself to return to my fellow-beings.

      To speak more fully on some of the incidents which Audubon here relates, I turn to one of the two journals which are all that fire has spared of the many volumes which were filled with his fine, rather illegible handwriting previous to 1826. In the earlier of these journals I read: "I went to France not only to escape Da Costa, but even more to obtain my father's consent to my marriage with my Lucy, and this simply because I thought it my moral and religious duty to do so. But although my request was immediately granted, I remained in France nearly two years. As I told you, Mr. Bakewell considered my Lucy too young (she was then but seventeen), and me too unbusiness-like to marry; so my father decided that I should remain some months with him, and on returning to America it was his plan to associate me with some one whose commercial knowledge would be of value to me.

      "My father's beautiful country seat, situated within sight of the Loire, about mid-distance between Nantes and the sea, I found quite delightful to my taste, notwithstanding the frightful cruelties I had witnessed in that vicinity, not many years previously. The gardens, greenhouses, and all appertaining to it appeared to me then as if of a superior cast; and my father's physician was above all a young man precisely after my own heart; his name was D'Orbigny, and with his young wife and infant son he lived not far distant. The doctor was a good fisherman, a good hunter, and fond of all objects in nature. Together we searched the woods, the fields, and the banks of the Loire, procuring every bird we could, and I made drawings of every one of them – very bad, to be sure, but still they were of assistance to me. The lessons which I had received from the great David18 now proved all-important to me, but what I wanted, and what I had the good fortune to stumble upon a few years later, was the knowledge of putting up my models, in true and good positions according to the ways and habits of my beautiful feathered subjects. During these happy years I managed to make drawings of about two hundred species of birds, all of which I brought to America and gave to my Lucy.19

      "At last my father associated me with Ferdinand Rozier, as you already know, and we were fairly smuggled out of France; for he was actually an officer attached to the navy of that country, and though I had a passport stating I was born at New Orleans, my French name would have swept that aside very speedily. Rozier's passport was a Dutch one, though he did not understand a single word in that language. Indeed, our passengers were a medley crowd; two days out two monks appeared among us from the hold, where our captain had concealed them."

      This same "medley crowd" appears to have comprised many refugees from the rule of Napoleon, this being about 1806, and the amusements were varied, including both gaming and dancing. To quote again: "Among the passengers was a handsome Virginian girl, young and graceful. She was constantly honored by the attentions of two Frenchmen who belonged to the nobility; both were fine young fellows, travelling, as was not uncommon then, under assumed names. One lovely day the bonnet of the fair lady was struck by a rope and knocked overboard. One of the French chevaliers at once leaped into the ocean, captured the bonnet, and had the good fortune to be picked up himself by the yawl. On reaching the deck he presented the bonnet with a graceful obeisance and perfect sang froid, while the rival looked at him as black as a raven. No more was heard of the matter till dawn, when reports of firearms were heard; the alarm was general, as we feared pirates. On gaining the deck it was found that a challenge had been given and accepted, a duel had positively taken place, ending, alas! in the death of the rescuer of the bonnet. The young lady felt this deeply, and indeed it rendered us all very uncomfortable."

      The voyage ended, Audubon returned to Mill Grove, where he remained some little time before his marriage to Lucy Bakewell. It was a home he always loved, and never spoke of without deep feeling. His sensitive nature, romantic if you will, was always more or less affected by environment, and Mill Grove was a most congenial spot to him.

      This beautiful estate in Montgomery Co., Pa., lies in a lovely part of the country. The house, on a gentle eminence, almost a natural terrace, overlooks, towards the west, the rapid waters of Perkiomen Creek, which just below empties into the Schuylkill river, across which to the south is the historic ground of Valley Forge. The property has remained in the Wetherill family nearly ever since Audubon sold it to Samuel Wetherill in 1813. The present owner20 delights to treasure every trace of the bird lover, and not only makes no changes in anything that he can in the least degree associate with him, but has added many photographs and engravings of Audubon which adorn his walls.

      The house, of the usual type of those days, with a hall passing through the centre and rooms on either side, was built of rubble-stone by Roland Evans in 1762, and in 1774 was sold to Admiral Audubon, who in the year following built an addition, also of rubble-stone. This addition is lower than the main house, which consists of two full stories and an attic with dormer windows, where, it is said, Audubon kept his collections. The same Franklin stove is in the parlor which stood there giving out its warmth and cheer when the young man came in from the hunting and skating expeditions on which he loved to dwell. The dense woods which once covered the ground are largely cut down, but sufficient forest growth remains to give

18

Jacques Louis David (1748-1825), court painter to Louis XVI. and afterwards to Napoleon I.

19

In 1836, Audubon wrote to Dr. John Bachman: "Some of my early drawings of European birds are still in our possession, but many have been given away, and the greatest number were destroyed, not by the rats that gnawed my collection of the "Birds of America," but by the great fire in New York, as these drawings were considered my wife's special property and seldom out of her sight. Would that the others had been under her especial care also! Yet, after all, who can say that it was not a material advantage, both to myself and to the world, that the Norway rats destroyed those drawings?"

20

Mr. W. H. Wetherill, of Philadelphia.