Page:John James Audubon (Burroughs).djvu/72

40 artist; he cared not for money, he wanted to be alone with Nature. The forests called to him, the birds haunted his dreams. His father dying in 1818, left him a valuable estate in France, and seventeen thousand dollars, deposited with a merchant in Richmond, Virginia; but Audubon was so dilatory in proving his identity and his legal right to this cash, that the merchant finally died insolvent, and the legatee never received a cent of it. The French estate he transferred in after years to his sister Rosa.