Audubon: An Intimate Life of the American Woodsman

To My Wife

Prologue

THE AMERICAN WOODSMAN

I have a rival in every bird.

Lucy Audubon

in a

letter to her sister Eliza.

". . . . but I love indepenn and piece more than

humbug and money."

John James Audubon,

in a letter

to his wife, dated Washington D. C. July 25, 1842

THE AMERICAN WOODSMAN

JOHN JAMES AUDUBON gathered for himself a fame and recognition which stamps him as one of the greatest of bird artists and naturalists of all time. A bronze bust of him occupies a niche in America's Hall of Fame, and a full length figure, compelling in its beauty of poise, surmounts a granite block in a park bearing his name in New Orleans, where many times he walked the narrow streets penniless, where he knew of the gnaw of hunger and the pain of disrepute. A set of his bird drawings, frequently characterized as the greatest monument erected by art to nature, which he humbly hawked throughout the United States and the ancient cities of England, Scotland, and France a mere century ago, sells today for more than twelve times the original subscription price.

Audubon was a gifted artist, quasi-naturalist, sometime dandy, quondam merchant, unkempt wanderer, many-sided human being. As a man he is far more interesting than aught he accomplished. A halo of romance surrounds his entire career, and he was generally regarded as mad because of his strange self-absorption, his long hair, tattered garments, and persistence in chasing about the countryside after little birds.

Vagabond at heart, Audubon let no responsibility or family tie keep him from the woods and the sound of bird music. He was alternately a fastidious dandy of the cities and a ragged, penniless wanderer of the by-ways and forest trail. He had a way with the ladies. He could play the flute and flageolet, bow the violin, and dance the cotillion with delicate grace. He liked his pinch of snuff and glass of grog, was superstitious about numbers, favoring the odd ones. He was skillful at plaiting hair. He was, withal, spectacular in his good looks and powerful of bone and sinew. Always he presents a figure of splendid genius.

He died just before completing his sixty-sixth year, and perhaps no other conspicuous character of the past hundred years has had more written and less revealed of his actual individuality than the excitable and gifted delineator of the birds of America, whose name, in scarcely a third of a century after his death, became and remains the shibboleth of wild life conservation.

Through half a hundred years the real Audubon was obscured by a biographical screen consisting of a heterogeneous combination of fact, fancy, and misrepresentation. Some of the contributions to this shroud were penned by loving but misguided relatives who through domestic partiality when writing about him colored his life misleadingly. His own account of himself and his affairs, which was never completed and was generously edited before being given to the public, is manifestly not four-square with facts ... for Audubon had a romantic imagination which defeats verification.

A granddaughter, presenting a record of her distinguished ancestor from his closely guarded journals, letters, and diaries, maintained she had "tried to put only Audubon the man" before her readers, "and in his own words so far as possible, that they may know what he was and not what others thought he was . . . and then suppressed the very passages in those documents that would more clearly illumine his true character. Other journals and diaries were burned so they would not fall into vandal hands, and the remaining data, when put into print, have been in many instances so edited, changed, deleted, and interpolated as to cloud the true portrait. Scarcely his own words."

One outstanding biography, however, is by an earnest student and ardent admirer of the artist naturalist. Professor Francis Hobart Herrick, after painstaking research, reached into the tantalizing obscurity of Audubon's birth and, aided by age-worn documents, revealed with clear and unbiased words heretofore unsuspected details of this event. Details not subscribed to by The American Woodsman's descendants. The present work is also by a student and admirer of the celebrated bird artist who, after twenty years of research, after a diligent study of the naturalist's original works . . . pictorial, literary, and familiar, and after years spent in the same bird paradise, the state of Louisiana, from which Audubon gathered the bulk of his material, is constrained to write the portrait found in the pages to come.

The mystery of Audubon's birth and parentage has been made the subject of particular attention. No final decision is reached. What his descendants believe, what Audubon himself would have his wife believe, is offered for the first time for your consideration.

To whichever belief one gives credence in reading the man's life, John James Audubon presents a fascinating figure in American history, a high light in American romance, a model in American achievement.

Close study reveals him as sportsman rather than student, as hunter-naturalist rather than ornithologist, one who loved nature more than he loved science, yet whose tenderness and love of bird life were coupled with the lust to kill the objects of his admiration ... the wonder subjects of his facile pencil. He who reflected the birds with crayon, brush, and water colors in the mirror of his magnificent genius, gained literary fame only through the ability of a ghost writer. Humility was his, he was at times the victim of an inferiority complex, yet he knew over-weening vanity and tenacity of purpose, his apparent laziness found contrast in his avidity for work.

A truly remarkable woman, a rosy-cheeked English girl had much to do with moulding this long-haired, gesticulating Frenchman into heroic proportions. A woman who worked when her husband seemed to dawdle, a wife who had perfect and beautiful faith in the eccentric genius she had married, and who never lost that faith. Had it not been for her devotion, her prodding tongue, her zeal, her self-sacrifice, the world would probably never have heard of Audubon. Therefore, for every plaudit we give the man for his accomplishment, a like acclaim must be reserved for Lucy Bakewell.

The story herein presented of Audubon's life and works has been carefully sifted and is set forth without intentional unkindness and with a faithful adherence to all obtainable truth and fact.

In recreating The American Woodsman, as Audubon so delighted to characterize himself, it is with the hope that I shall let him speak for himself, and set him wandering again in the printed pages as he did, a century and more ago, through the magnolia forests of his beloved Louisiana.

Book One

The Boy Audubon

The precise period of my birth is yet an enigma to me.

John James Audubon, in his

      autobiography Myself.

CHAPTER 1

La Gerbetière on the Loire

THE DATE and place of John James Audubon's birth have been for years matters of dispute. He would have his wife and sons believe that an enigma shrouded the question of his parentage and throughout his diaries and journals he makes conflicting statements regarding the place of his nativity and his age. In a printed autobiography he refers to the puzzling background of his life. Certain passages in his many writings contain references to his great secret, to his noble birth, as well as an underscored declaration that he was an aristocrat. Many of these illuminating entries have been repressed—some of them even changed when given to the world via the printed page.

Today, descendants, having absorbed such references throughout their lives, refer guardedly to a Bourbon resemblance and hint that Audubon may have been the subject of that strange and interesting problem of the Lost Dauphin of France, child of the martyred Louis Seize and Marie Antoinette, the little prince who by an ill turn of the wheel of fortune became the pathetic Prisoner of the Temple whose ultimate fate has proved to be the greatest riddle the world has yet been called upon to solve.

A granddaughter, having written a history of her distinguished grandfather and edited his journals before giving them to the world, sets at the bottom of a series of withheld extracts from his writings that it is her belief that John James Audubon was in fact the Dauphin of France who mysteriously disappeared during the French Revolution!

Such a possibility fires the imagination.

Yet—a bronze statue in New Orleans proclaims the bird artist a native son of Louisiana, and for years past the Encyclopedia Britannica, too evidently taking authority lightly, has published a record of AUDUBON, JOHN JAMES, American naturalist said to have been born on the 5th of May, 1780, in Louisiana, his father having been a French naval officer and his mother a Spanish Creole.

Subsequent to the publication in 1917 of newly-discovered documents by Francis Hobart Herrick, the Britannica altered the life sketch in later editions to read: AUDUBON, JOHN JAMES ( 1 785-1851 ) American naturalist born at Aux Cayes, Santo Domingo, now Haiti, April 26, 1 785. By his father, Lieut. John Audubon, a French naval officer and planter, the boy was taken to the United States and then to France. Even in his petted boyhood he was fond of nature and began making collections . . . etc.

Neither Professor Herrick with his legally attested documents nor the latest edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica has prevailed generally. There are still those who persist in claiming that Audubon was born in Louisiana (somewhere in the New World was the vague phrasing in the Introductory Address to his Ornithological Biography). Some name the city of New Orleans as the actual spot, some the never definitely located Louisiana plantation of his father, some the plantation Fonlainebleau, property of the exclusive Bernard de Mandeville de Marigny on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain . . . there was even a claim that Audubon's mother was taken ill on a Mississippi flatboat when it was moored at Nine Mile Point, a short distance above New Orleans, and that the boy was born there!

All of which weaves an intricate tapestry background for Audubon's biography. The incredible suggestion of his noble birth is like a crimson thread glowing through it. Fact faces the reader, yet the breath of a mysterious whisper, emanating from the lips of the man himself, has obscured it.

The documents which Professor Herrick uncovered would establish as a fact that John James Audubon was born at Aux Cayes, on the island of San Domingo, on April 26, 1785, to a ship's captain named Jean Audubon and one Mile. Rabin, styled, as was the custom at that time, a Creole de Saint-Domingue. Captain Audubon's own wife, Anne Moynet Ricodel, a widow, whom he had married seven years previously, was then living in Nantes, France.

This left-handed boy of Captain Audubon's, the documents point out, was himself termed a creole de Saint-Domingue, and named Jean Rabin; that his mother died shortly after her son's birth; that the boy lived in Aux Cayes until he was a little more than four, and then was taken to the United States, with a half-sister named Muget Bouffard, a child also born to Captain Audubon in another and later island affaire. The ship's captain went on to France with his two natural children and when the three arrived at Nantes, Mme. Audubon received the trio with characteristic Gallic warmth and affection. When the boy, Jean Rabin, was eight, and his half-sister (her name changed to Rosa) was six, Captain Audubon and his wife legally adopted them and gave them the name of Audubon.

So much for divergent records of John James Audubon's origin. Detailed review of this event, extracts from various authorities, testimony of descendants on this clouded phase of his existence, conjectures, inferences, argumentations, conclusions, have been correlated in the pages of the appendix.

With the papers of adoption drawn before a notary, properly witnessed and filed in Nantes, the boy, in 1 794, became Jean Jacques Fougere Audubon, and at that time we take up the thread of the story of this lad who became The American Woodsman, as he begins his eventful and colorful career— a legalized love child, presumably born in Santo Domingo, and reared in France when the thunders of the Revolution roared over that land.

2

Jean Jacques LaForet Fougere Audubon, to give the lad the full complement of names borne at this period of his career, was given an education appropriate to Captain Audubon's purse, but this could not have been at all extensive, as young Audubon's original letters, journals, and diaries, either in French or English, disclose a marked inability to spell correctly. This is not strange for his school hardly deserved the name, so the boy tells us, and his private teachers were the means through which he acquired the least benefit. Captain Audubon, who had long followed the sea and who, upon his return from Santo Domingo, joined the French navy, de,sired that the boy he had brought from Aux Cayes should follow in his steps on the quarterdeck. Finding that such a career failed to interest the lad to whom he had given his name, Jean Audubon expressed the wish that he would study to become an engineer.

An engineer? Ah, that was something different. Consequently, with such a career in mind, the boy studied drawing, geography, and mathematics, and also took up fencing and music for which he declared he had a natural talent. I had a good fencing master, and a first-rate teacher of the violin; mathematics was^hard, dull work, I thought; geography pleased me more, he wrote in one account of his youthful days. For my other studies, as well as for dancing, I was quite enthusiastic; and well I recollect how anxious I was then to become the commander of a corps of dragoons.

Young Audubon confesses that, as his father was frequently, away from home, his foster mother permitted him to do pretty much as he pleased. Instead of applying himself to the studies mapped out for him by his educators, he much preferred association with the boys of his own age and disposition in the village who were fond of seeking out birds' nests, birds' eggs, fishing, and shooting, and was not at all taken with the idea of conning spellers, doing sums in arithmetic and subjecting himself to other drudgeries of the schoolroom. Consequently, he became adept in playing hooky!

Thus almost every day instead of going to school when I ought to have gone, I usually made for the fields, where I spent the day [he set down in his autobiography]; my little basket went with me, filled with good eatables, and when I returned home, during either winter or summer, it was replenished with what I would call curiosities, such as birds' nests, birds' eggs, curious lichens, flowers of all sorts, and even pebbles gathered along the shore of some rivulet.

Once when Captain Audubon returned to his country estate, La Gerbetiere, on the outskirts of Coueron, a village situated on the banks of the Loire nine miles from Nantes, he showed(He was so pleased to see my various collections that he complimented me on my taste for such things, recalled the boy in later years. "But when he inquired what else I had done, and I, like a culprit, hung my head, he left me without saying another word. Dinner over, he asked my sister for some music and, on her playing for him, he was so pleased with her improvement he presented her with a beautiful book. I was next asked to play on my violin, but alas! for nearly a month I had not touched it; it was stringless: not one word was said on that subject.

'Had I any drawings to show?' Only a few, and those not so good. My good father looked at his wife, kissed my sister, and humming a tune left the room. The next morning at dawn- of day my father and I were under way in a private carriage; my trunk, etc., were fastened to it, my violin case under my feet, the postilion was ordered to proceed, my father took a book from his pocket, and while he silently read I was left entirely to my own thoughts.

The journey ended at the military town of Rochefort. When the two had entered Captain Audubon's lodgings the elder seated young Audubon at his side and taking firm hold of his hands said: "My beloved boy, thou art now safe. I have brought thee here that I may be able to pay constant attention to thy studies; thou shalt have ample time for pleasures, but the remainder must be employed with industry and care.

The lad had an aversion to anything English and while at Rochefort voiced this feeling to Captain Audubon who replied: Laforest, thy blood will cool in time, and thou wilt be surprised to see how gradually prejudices are obliterated and friendships acquired towards those at one time we held in contempt. Thou hast not been in England; I have, and it is a fine country. Years afterwards when the boy had become a man, when honors were being heaped upon him in England and Scotland, he remembered Jean Audubon's words.

When he was fourteen—this was in 1800—he was enrolled in the military school at Rochefort. However, neither a military nor an engineering career was the future's gift for this adoptive lad of Captain Audubon's—he cared more for the fields, the birds, the animals, the sunshine, and the trees than for tomes on the art of arms. He was no fighting man. From his own story we learn that after a short cruise as a midshipman he was back at Nantes and later at Coueron, where at the villa La Gerbetiere he was once more in his element. During all these years there existed within me a tendency to follow Nature in her walks, he wrote his sons in after years. Perhaps not an hour of leisure was spent elsewhere than in the woods and fields, to examine either the eggs, nest, young, or parents of any species of birds constituted my greatest delight.

It was at this period of his career, when he was fifteen so he says, that he began the development of the ability that afterwards brought him fame. He made a series of drawings of the birds found in that part of France, which he continued until they numbered about two hundred. They were all bad enough, yet they were representations of birds, and I felt pleased with them, he adds.

The boy's foster mother, in spite of the strange manner in which he came to her from over the seas, was devotedly attached to him. Far too much for his own good, he acknowledged, for she was desirous that he should be brought up to live and die like a gentleman, and believed that fine clothes and filled pockets were the only requisites necessary to attain that end. She, therefore, completely spoiled me, confessed the object of her adoration, hid my faults, boasted to everyone of my youthful merits and, worst of all, said frequently in my presence that I was the handsomest boy in France.

The good Anne Moynet saw that all the boy's whims and idle notions were gratified the instant they were expressed, and she went so far as to give him carle blanche at confectionary shops. An earnest Catholic herself, she had the boy baptized in a church of that religion. To this he says, while he was surprised, he was indifferent. As he loved her as though she had been his own mother, the boy took to the catechism and studied it with other matters pertaining to the ceremony. It was not long before he learned the reason for this sudden religious flurry on the part of Mme. Audubon— she wanted him to become a priest.

When Captain Audubon learned of his wife's plans he flew into a rage. He refused to allow the boy to even think of embracing holy orders. He exacted from him a solem oath that he would never enter the Church. The captain's only explanation was—the boy must have heirs . . legitimate heirs!

Consequently Laforest Audubon did not become a priest nor did he even remain a Catholic. As a matter of fact, later in life he eschewed all religious beliefs and upon a number of occasions made most uncomplimentary references to the religion of his baptism. When in Kentucky he became a member of Free Masonry.

The boy's sixteenth and seventeenth years were spent at La Cerbetiere and in the countryside that lay about Coueron. It is evident that at this period, 1802 and 1803, he was busy at what he termed his bad enough representations of birds. Unfortunately none of these original drawings has been handed down to posterity so that we may pass judgment on them. It is quite likely that the captain realized the lad from San Domingo needed art instruction and to this end, or so Audubon claimed in later life, sent him to Paris to study drawing under Jacques Louis David, the popular artist of that period of the Revolution who, in spite of his pronounced enmity against the last five despots of France, became the court painter for Napoleon. At David's Louvre studio young Audubon says he was set to drawing from manikins and began the study of the rudiments of the art by transferring to paper, by crayon and pencil, the designs of inanimate casts. The boy was disappointed. He had expected that he would be permitted to perfect himself in depicting animal life—something that would be alive and moving. To his disgust eyes and noses belonging to giants, and heads of horses, represented in ancient sculpture, were his models.

As might be suspected, after a month or two at David's atelier, Laforest Audubon returned to Coueron and his doting foster mother, free again to roam fields and play with bird drawings. He drew the winged creatures of the meadows, river bank and roadside hedges because they intrigued him, because some stirring genius in him called for expression. There was something in his blood that claimed a kinship for the wild.

He has left us a pen picture of these early formative days:

When, as a little lad, I first began my attempts at representing birds on paper, I was far from possessing much knowledge of their nature, and, like hundreds of others, when I had laid the effort aside, I was under the impression that it was the finished picture of a bird because it possessed some sort of a head and tail, and two sticks in lieu of legs; I never troubled myself with the thought that abutments were requisite to prevent it from falling backward or forward; and, oh! what bills and daws I did draw, to say nothing of a straight line for a back, and a tail stuck in anyhow, like an unshipped rudder.

Many others in Coueron besides his foster mother and Captain Audubon inspected the boy's attempts to picture the feathered inhabitants of that section of France. Many there were who unstintingly praised these crude daubs, and Audubon in later years admitted that no boy was ever nearer being completely wrecked than he was by such flattery. Captain Audubon was not one of these praise spendthrifts. He constantly impressed upon me that nothing in the world possessing life and animation was easy to imitate, remembered the boy throughout his life, and that as I grew older he hoped I would become more and more alive to this.

Young Audubon tells us that his first bird drawings were all "represented strictly ornithologicall)), which means more or less in stiff, unmeaning profiles, such as are found in most works published to the present day. My next set were begun in America, and there, without my honoured mentor, I betook myself to the drawing of specimens hung by a string tied to one foot, having a desire to show every portion, as the wings lay loosely spread, as well as the tail."

In this manner, the embryo artist admits, he made some pretty fair signs for poulterers.

We have it in his own words that this love for nature came to him early in life. In his justly celebrated Ornithological Biography Audubon devoted several prefatory pages to himself, in which he made only a single reference to his birth, but a great many to his infatuation for the birds and flowers.

I received light and life in the New World, was his single contribution in his great work to the enigma of his birth. When I had hardly yet learned to walk and to articulate those first words always so endearing to parents, the productions of Nature that lay spread all around were pointed out to me. They soon became my playmates; and before my ideas were sufficiently formed to enable me to estimate the difference between the azure of the sky, the emerald of the bright foliage, I felt that an intimacy with them, not consisting of friendship merely, but bordering on phrenzy, must accompany my steps through life.

As he developed into manhood his wishes grew with his form. I was fervently desirous of becoming acquainted with Nature, he wrote, but for many years was sadly disappointed, and adds: forever it was my lot to have desires that could not be gratified. The moment a bird was dead, however beautiful it had been in life, the pleasure arising from possession of it became blunted, and although the greatest care was bestowed on endeavors to preserve the appearance of nature, I looked on its vesture as more than sullied, as requiring constant attention and repeated mendings, which, after all, it could not be said to be fresh from the hands of its Maker. I wished to possess all the productions of nature, but wished life with them. This was impossible. Then what was to be done?

For an answer he turned to Captain Audubon and laid bare his problem, his disappointments, and anxiety. Captain Jean produced a book of Illustrations; just what they illustrated the budding artist did not'state, but he did declare: A new life ran in my veins. I turned over the leaves with avidity; and although what I saw was not what I longed for, it gave me a desire to copy nature. To nature I went, and tried to imitate her, as in the days of my childhood I have tried to raise myself from the ground and stand erect, before nature had imparted the vigour necessary for the success of such an undertaking.

For a number of years, he admits, his attempts to copy, to imitate nature were worse than the illustrations he had regarded as bad in the book Captain Audubon had given him. My pencil gave birth to a family of cripples. So maimed were most of them, that they resembled mangled corpses on a field of battle, compared with the integrity of living men. These difficulties and disappointments irritated me but never for a moment destroyed the desire of obtaining perfect representatives of nature. The worse my drawings were, the more beautiful did I see the originals.

Consequently, he drew and drew. Hundreds of these crude and amateurish sketches of the birds that inhabited the woods along the Loire he says were produced day after day and then destroyed by his own hands. They made bonfires on the anniversary of my birthday, he says ... but withholds the date of his entry into this world!

3

In the summer of 1803, when the young man was eighteen, there came a momentous change in Laforest Audubon's life. Although it had long been believed by those inhabiting the pleasant little villa La Gerbetiere on the Loire that it was Captain Audubon's unshaken intention that the boy, now nearing manhood, should be enrolled in Napoleon's army and like other sons of France should follow the First Consul's victorious eagles, the elder Audubon suddenly and strangely changed his mind and made hurried arrangements to send his adoptive son to far-off America.

He explained to Laforest that he had two objects in mind in wishing him to quit France—first, that the boy should begin to learn something about trade, and, secondly, the English language. The youth was provided with a letter to a rich Quaker of Philadelphia who had acted as Captain Audubon's agent for several years and intrusted with the supervision of a farm the captain had acquired in I 789. Being well supplied with funds when he left Santo Domingo, Jean Audubon, during his stay in Philadelphia before returning to France with the little boy and girl, had purchased a lovely stretch of country on the Perkioming Creek just above the spot where this gentle tree-lined stream empties into the historic Schuylkill River.

Here, at beautiful Mill Grove was the young creole de Saint-Domingue, so mysteriously hurried from France, to become intimately acquainted with the land he afterwards grew to love with a passion that knew no bounds.

CHAPTER 2

Mill Grove on the Perkioming

ALTHOUGH the exact time of John James Audubon's first voyage from France to the United States, the name of the vessel on which he sailed and such other details so dear to the heart of a biographer are not known, it can be set down in fact that the skipper of the ship that carried the young man across the Atlantic was named John Smith.

It was during the last days of August or the first ones in September of 1803 that the lad, to his intense and indescribable pleasure, found himself in New York. His first American adventure came when he caught the yellow fever by walking to a bank in Greenwich street to cash letters of credit. The illness that laid the young Frenchman low was not the dread Yellow Jack but a malignant fever of another type that was prevalent in New York in 1804. Whether from one fever or another, ill he became. So ill that Skipper John Smith took him to Morristown, New Jersey, and placed him in a boarding-house kept by two large-hearted Quaker ladies. Under their tender ministrations young Audubon was nursed back to health and from them learned his first words of the English language.

When Miers Fisher, Captain Audubon's agent in Philadelphia, heard of the eighteen-year-old boy's plight that gruff yet kindly Quaker hurried to Morristown in his carriage and removed the invalid to his own villa on the Trenton Road just outside the City of Brotherly Love . . . a city that was anything but that to Audubon in after years.

Miers Fisher had been Captain Audubon's trusted agent for a dozen years and the Quaker and the French naval officer entertained a common admiration for each other. So you may be sure good care was taken of the handsome youth who lay in one of the Fisher beds and that he became a personage of importance to the members of that Quaker family. Indeed, Audubon set down a quarter of a century later in his oft-quoted Myself, it would seem that Mr. Fisher was actually desirous that I should become a member of his family, and this was evinced in a few days by the manner in which the good Quaker presented me to a daughter of no mean appearance.

Laforest Audubon took an unconquerable dislike to the comely Quakeress, so he tells us, and, naturally, the match did not materialize. There were other objections . . . Miers Fisher opposed music of all kinds. He frowned on dancing. He could not endure the sight of the young man from Nantes carrying a fishing rod. He condemned in round terms most of the other things Audubon called amusements. Worst of all, he frowned upon the young man's constant habit of going out to the fields with a gun to shoot birds!

This last prohibition settled matters for Laforest Audubon who. in a mixture of broken English and excitable French, insisted on leaving the house of don'ts and being installed on Captain Audubon's estate. Early the next morning the austere Quaker had his carriage ready and young Audubon and his luggage stowed in it. The whip flicked over the horses' backs and at the end of the journey John James Audubon stepped for the first time on the soil of Mill Grove, a place destined to remain a milestone in his colorful remembrance of life.

The farm was in charge of a tenant, one William Thomas, another Quaker, who with his wife and sons cordially received the young man from far-off France. Mill Grove was a beautiful place and there was little to be desired when Audubon took possession of the farm except—yes, there n>as one fly in the ointment—he had become master of Mill Grove under certain restrictions, he tells us, which amounted to my not receiving more than enough money per quarter than was considered sufficient for the expenditure of a young gentleman.

Poof! What was money when there were hunting, fishing, drawing, music to occupy his every moment? To him Mill Grove became a blessed spot. In his early walks about the place he thought he detected traces of Captain Audubon's presence in the fences that surrounded the fields, the regular manner in which the trees had been planted in avenues, as well as the mathematical precision of the orchard trees. The mill on the rippling Perkioming was an ever-increasing joy. In a cave, where he discovered pewees building their nests and raising their young, he never failed to find soothing solitude and a delight in absorbing the secrets of nature. Here, in this cave, with the pewees as subjects, he carried on the first bird-banding experiments ever attempted in this country.

Of cares he had none and cared nothing about cares, he boasted. He purchased excellent horses, visited such neighbors as he found congenial—they were few—and from the tenant Thomas and his wife learned a little English, which undoubtedly accounts for the many thees and thous and other Quaker idioms found in his mature writings. Mill Grove being near Philadelphia, Audubon thought nothing of walking to and from the town of Penn's Woods when no conveyance was at hand. As the distance is a matter of some twenty-five miles we might set this down to a piece of Audubon's characteristically enthusiastic writing but for the fact that other examples of long walks he records apparently prove him a most remarkable pedestrian.

Not far to the south of this Montgomery county farm was historic Valley Forge where Washington and his ragged and bloody-footed Continentals passed the winter of 1 777-78. "It was at Mill Grove," Audubon wrote in his autobiography, and only a few days before the memorable battle of Valley Forge, that General Washington presented my father with his portrait. This statement is far from being accurate, for there was no battle of Valley Forge, and during the winter that Washington and his ragged soldiers shivered in their rude huts, Captain Jean Audubon was on the high seas and far, far from Pennsylvania. Such slips are frequent in The American Woodsman's writings.

In the early summer the caretaker's wife informed the impetuous young Frenchman that a farm immediately across the Philadelphia road, called Fatland Ford, had been purchased by an Englishman who had moved into it with a large family, consisting largely of daughters. Mrs. Thomas coupled this information with the suggestion that Audubon observe the usual amenities and welcome the newcomers. The lad, just turned nineteen, shrugged his shoulders with an eloquent Gallic gesture and replied that, as far as he was concerned, the English were merely English, and to him they were nossmg. He cared even less that the household boasted several handsome daughters ... the beautiful pointer dogs, which he had perceived at a distance, would interest him more. Voila ce que c'est!

The Englishman, however, had no such aversions to young Frenchmen so he called on the young master of Mill Grove and, not finding him at home, the caller left his card, which bore the name of William Bakewell, and expressed to Mrs. Thomas his sincere regret at not finding Mr. Audubon in. The Englishman left a message—he would be honored if Mr. Audubon would join him on a shooting expedition. When the good Quakeress reported the call and delivered the message the boy was quick with his reply—he would not meet the new neighbors! They were English, and he, Audubon, had the greatest prejudices against all of that hated nationality! Return the call? Not he! All this in spite of the fact, inwardly, he recognized that his position was as absurd as it was ungentlemanly and impolite. He was determined to have nossing to do with the family Bakewell.

Summer waned. The woods glowed with their covering of autumnal gold and carmine. Broad maple leaves floated down from the tree tops in all their dying glory of scarlet and yellow. A sharp frost or two—then the first fine smattering of snow and a go after grouse called Audubon from the blazing fireplace of Mill Crove. As the youth with his everpresent gun was threading the thickets and the firs that lined the banks of the Perkioming, he came face to face with a ruddy-faced, white-haired man also intent on bringing down a brace of the birds. The elder spoke first and kindly, too, and the hot-blooded French boy, entering into conversation, was soon apologizing in broken English for his discourtesy in not returning the other's call. He admired the Englishman's dogs, noting in addition to their beauty of carriage, how well they had been trained. He later became impressed with the Englishman's expert marksmanship. So the oddly-assorted pair continued after the grouse, which were plentiful, and the banging of their muzzle-loaders resounded through the snowclad woods.

The return call was made on a crisp morning. Whether or not it was the very next morning Audubon does not tell us, but knowing his impetuosity of that period we may be quite safe in surmising it occurred the day following the meeting in the woods. Thirty years later Audubon lived again the ecstasies of that momentous event when penning a short story of his life for the eyes of his two sons, Victor and John. The printed version that has been made public from this long-lost manuscript reads:

Well do I recollect the morning, and may it please God I may never forget it, when for the first time I entered Mr. Bakewell's dwelling. It happened that he was absent from home, and I was shown into a parlor where only one young lady was seated at her work by the fire. She rose on my entrance, offered me a seat, and assured me of the gratification her father would feel on his return, which, she added, would be in a few moments, as she would dispatch a servant for him. Other ruddy cheeks and bright eyes made their transient appearance, but, like spirits gay, soon vanished from my sight; and there I sat, my gaze riveted, as it were, on the young girl before me, who, half working, half talking, essayed to make the time pleasant to me. Oh! may God bless her! it was she, my dear sons, who afterwards became my beloved wife and your dear mother.

The Englishman made his appearance in a short time and welcomed his young neighbor in hearty British fashion, introduced the members of his family to the caller who amused them by his quaint Gallic accent. Lucy, who was seventeen; Eliza, who was fourteen; Sarah, just twelve; Ann, nine; Thomas Woodhouse, then sixteen, and William Gilford, a tiny lad of five. Introductions over, Squire Bakewell, like a true Britisher, called for tea.

Lucy was told to have luncheon produced. She now rose from her seat a second time, and her form, to which I had previously paid

but partial attention, showed both grace and beauty; and my heart followed every one of her steps. Lucy, I was pleased to believe, looked upon me with some favor, and I turned more especially to her on leaving. I felt that certain je ne sais quoi which intimated that, at least, she was not indifferent to me.

So here we have in Audubon's romantic career, a typical case of boy meets girl, of love at first sight between a young Frenchman of nineteen, and a seventeen-year-old slip of a girl from England. This meeting between Lucy Green Bakewell and John James Audubon becomes one of the turning points in his well-rounded career, although not the pivotal point as far as his life's work was concerned ... for that came seventeen years later and in a far distant place.

When the young man just emerging from his teens stalked into the home of one of the hated British and bowed low to the ruddy-cheeked English girl sewing by the open fireplace, his position in world of famous men became assured—for had it not been for Lucy Bakewell, you and I might never have heard of a man named Audubon.

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Lucy Green Bakewell was born at Burton-on-Trent, England, January 18, 1787. Her father, William Bakewell, first came to America in 1798 and with his brother Benjamin started brewing English ale at New Haven, Connecticut. In that establishment the brothers Bakewell reproduced to perfection the famous Burton ales of Merrie England. A disastrous fire ended this business, and, after bringing his family to the infant United States in 1802, William Bakewell purchased Fatland Ford in 1804, and there, within a few months after arriving in her new home, his wife died.

Wherefore, we are first introduced to Lucy Bakewell, as was Audubon, soon after her father had been left a widower, and when the girl had been in America only two years. We do not know as much of her at that period as we do of the man she afterwards married and moulded into greatness, for Audubon, with rather bombastic frankness, told his sons a great deal about himself during these courting days and little of the object of his affections.

We learn that Audubon's first meeting with the family Bakewell was quickly followed by another at his home in Mill Grove. The Perkioming was congealed with ice and from all the neighborhood the young folk of the quiet Pennsylvania countryside were playing pranks on the glassy surface of the creek. Being a good skater, and anxious no doubt to display this accomplishment before the young lady who had so interested him, the young squire of Mill Grove sent a blanket invitation to the inhabitants of Fatland Ford to be his guests for dinner. Partridges and grouse, trapped by his tenant's sons, formed the main courses of the meal Audubon had set before his British guests.

Dinner over, all repaired to the ice of the creek and there in comfortable sledges, each fair one was propelled by an ardent skater, Audubon recalled in after years. Tales of love may be extremely stupid to the majority, so I will not expatiate on those days, but to me, dear sons, and under such circumstances as then, and thank God, now exist, every moment was to me one of delight.

Can there be any doubt that the sled propelled by Audubon over the mirror-like surface of the frozen Perkioming held the slight but comfortably furred figure of Lucy Bakewell?

The property owned by Captain Audubon and that purchased by William Bakewell were separated by a road linking Morristown with Pauling's Landing, a part of the main highway leading to Philadelphia,; consequently, Mill Grove and Fatland Ford were less than a mile apart. The friendship deepened. Lucy Bakewell soon was teaching Laforest Audubon English and she received lessons in French and drawing in return. The two saw each other daily. That they had fallen in love astonished no one ... not even the two most vitally concerned.

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had purchased the best horses the country could afford. He rode well and was proud of his horsemanship. He possessed a large and varied assortment of firearms and fishing tackle, the most expensive that could be procured, in fact they were not wanted if they were not richly ornamented with silver. He spent a lot of time and money on his clothes. Indeed, though in America, he admits, I cut as many foolish pranks as a young dandy in Bond street or Piccadilly. Read his own pen-portrait:

I was in plain terms what might be called extremely extravagant. I had no vices, it is true, neither had I any high aims. I was ever fond of shooting, fishing and riding on horseback; the raising of fowls of every sort was one of my hobbies, and to reach the maximum of my desires in those different things filled every one of my thoughts. I was ridiculously fond of dress. To have seen me go shooting in black satin smallclothes, or breeches, with silk stockings, and the finest ruffled shirt Philadelphia could afford, was, as I now realize, an absurd spectacle, but it was one of my foibles, and I shall not conceal it.

This was the young man who made violent and tempestuous love to Lucy Bakewell. He was fond of music, dancing, and drawing. As he had been well instructed in each, he lost no opportunity to display these accomplishments. He had his share of love for amusements and never a ball, skating match, house party, or riding assemblage was given but that the young man with the excitable French manner of speaking, who gesticulated wildly, was very much in evidence, and became the life of every gathering. He declares he was not addicted to gambling, disliked cards, was "temperate to an intemperate degree, and that: he never swallowed a glass of wine nor spirits until the day of his wedding. The result has been my uncommon, indeed, iron constitution."

He was most finical, however, in his choice of foods and for this reason did not accept many dinner invitations because of his peculiarities in this regard occasioned comment. Pies, puddings, eggs, milk or cream was all I cared for in the way of food, he declares, adding that on more than one occasion he robbed his tenant's wife of the cream she had setting for the Philadelphia market.

All this time I was as fair and rosy as a girl, though strong, indeed stronger than most men, should I not have kept to that delicious mode of living? and why should not mankind in general be more abstemious than mankind is?

This was the fop and dandy who preened his fine feathers before his neighbor's eldest girl. That he believed himself a fine bird is borne out in his characteristic sketch of himself at this period:

I measured five feet, ten and one-half inches, was of fair mem. and quite a handsome figure; large, dark blue, and rather sunken eyes, light coloured eyebrows, aquiline nose and a fine set of teeth; hair, fine texture and luxuriant, divided and passing down behind each ear in luxuriant ringlets as far as my shoulders.

What wonder then that the eyes of Lucy Bakewell brightened, that her rosy cheeks became rosier still, that her heart beat faster and her breath quickened when such a romantic figure began paying her marked attentions.

Audubon and the father of the four Bakewell girls were always hunting and Audubon displayed time and again his proficiency with gold and silver encrusted guns. One morning while skating on the Perkioming with Tom Bakewell, he was challenged by Lucy's brother to hit his cap as it was tossed into the air, and while the shooter would be racing by at full speed. Audubon accepted, the challenge—undoubtedly the fair Lucy was on the banks an interested spectator.

I was to pass by at full speed, within about twenty-five feet of where he stood, and to shoot only when he gave the word, is Audubon's version. Off I went like lightning, up and down, as if to boast of my prowess while on the glittering surface beneath my feet; coming, however, within the agreed distance the signal was given, the trigger pulled, off went the load, and down on the ice came the hat of my future brother-in-law, as completely perforated as if a sieve.

As a countryside sensation Audubon not only attracted the fair sex but men with whom he came in contact as well, as witness what David Pawling, a neighbor, wrote:

Today I saw the swiftest skater I ever beheld; backwards and forewards he went like the wind, even leaping over large air-holes fifteen feet or more across, and continuing to skate without an instant s delay. I was told he was a young Frenchman, and this evening I met him at a ball, where I found his dancing exceeded his skating; all the ladies wished him as a partner; moreover, a more handsome man I never saw, his eyes alone command attention; his name, Audubon, is strange to me.

While John James Audubon was cutting capers on the ice of the Perkioming his business affairs were becoming entangled. Soon after his arrival at Mill Grove, the tenant Thomas called his attention to the presence of a lead-ore deposit on the farm. This information, likewise, had been communicated to Captain Audubon in France and he had sent a man named Francis Dacosta to develop the lead mine on a partnership basis. The man with the Portuguese name succeeded Mier3 Fisher as Captain Audubon's agent soon after his arrival, and exercised, or endeavored to exercise, a tutorship over the boy.

The young Frenchman took an instant and intense dislike to Dacosta. A covetous wretch, he termed him. One reason for this feeling was due to the fact that Dacosta endeavored to persuade Audubon that his affection for the English girl was rash and inconsiderate. He spoke triflingly of her and her parents, and one day said to me that for a man of my rank and expectations to marry Lucy Bakewell was out of the question, declares Audubon, who was certain his answers exasperated the new manager, for Dacosta immediately curtailed his allowances.

In spite of the antagonism between the two, Audubon relates how Dacosta influenced him in his efforts to portray birds on paper. The manager was always praising the youngster's ability in this direction and one morning while Audubon was endeavoring to properly portray a great blue heron, he assured me that the time might come when I should be a great American naturalist. However curious it may seem to the scientific world that these sayings from the lips of such a man should affect me, I assure you they had great weight with me, and I felt a certain degree of pride in these words even then.

Dacosta, who was, according to Laforest Audubon, his partner, tutor, and monitor, did more than curtail the boy's allowances. He secretly began making arrangements to ship Audubon off to India. When this information came to the Frenchman's ears he also heard the rumor that Dacosta had gone to Philadelphia to arrange his passage to Canton, China. India or China it was all the same to Audubon, who, wild with rage, followed his tutor to Philadelphia, denounced him for interfering with his affairs of the heart, and demanded enough money to enable him to sail at once for France and lay the whole matter before Captain Audubon.

The