Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/708

690 one of Walter Scott's novels, and was a relative of the famous British geologist Bakewell. She proved a congenial wife to the naturalist, and gave him valuable aid while he had his great work under way, by helping him to pay the expenses of his enterprise out of the fruits of her own industry. The farm at Mill Grove was sold, a stock of goods was purchased with the proceeds, and Audubon removed with his wife to Louisville, making the journey down the Ohio River in a flat-boat, with two rowers. At Louisville, again, he left business to his partner, and occupied himself with natural history and his drawings.

In 1810 he was visited at his store by Alexander Wilson, who came to solicit subscriptions to his "Ornithology." He was about to sign the list, when his partner suggested to him, in French, that he could make better drawings than Wilson, and probably knew as much about American birds as he. Wilson understood the remark, and asked Audubon if he had any drawings of birds. Audubon exhibited what he had, and, to Wilson's question if he intended to publish his work, replied that he had never thought of it. The two naturalists seem to have spent some time together. Audubon explored the woods with Wilson, lent him his drawings, and aided him in various ways; but, after all this, Wilson, in the mortification of his vanity that he had met a superior in his own special field, had it in his heart to enter in his notes against Louisville that "science or literature had not one friend in the place."

As might be expected, the business at Louisville was not prosperous. After four years, marked by two removals to secure better success, the partnership was dissolved, and Audubon removed to Henderson, Kentucky, in 1812. Another business adventure, entered into with his brother-in-law in New Orleans, failed. Only natural history prospered with him. A very large proportion of his work in this line, which bore so noble and so abundant fruit in later years, was done during his residence in Henderson. Aiming to represent the birds which he drew in position as far as possible, he adopted ingenious devices to secure correct views of them as they looked in Nature. Those which he had to shoot he would afterward set up and support in natural attitudes, while he painted them; others he would view, with their actual surroundings, through a telescope. Audubon's father died about 1812, leaving to him the estate in France and seventeen thousand dollars, which had been deposited with a merchant in Richmond, Virginia. "Audubon, however, took no steps to obtain possession of his estate in France, and in after-years, when his sons had grown up, sent one of them to France for the purpose of legally transferring the property to his own sister Rosa." Before Audubon was able to obtain the money from the merchant in Richmond, the latter died insolvent; and so no benefit accrued to the naturalist from either part of his legacy.

By the pressure of this disappointment and other failures, Audubon