Page:John James Audubon (Burroughs).djvu/121

Rh Four hours' sleep out of the twenty-four was his allotted allowance.

One often marvels at Audubon's apparent indifference to his wife and his home, for from the first he was given to wandering. Then, too, his carelessness in money matters, and his improvident ways, necessitating his wife's toiling to support the family, put him in a rather unfavourable light as a "good provider," but a perusal of his journal shows that he was keenly alive to all the hardships and sacrifices of his wife, and from first to last in his journeyings he speaks of his longings for home and family. "Cut off from all dearest me," he says in one of his youthful journeys, and in his latest one he speaks of himself as being as happy as one can be who is "three thousand miles from the dearest friend on earth." Clearly some impelling force held him to the pursuit of this work, hardships or no hardships. Fortunately for him, his wife shared his