Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/416

402 had a humor which enabled him at times to joke about his necessities. He had a gift of satire, also, which got him into some trouble, but which was the cause of his taking the first step in the path that led to fame. Industrial affairs in Great Britain at that time were greatly unsettled. Many of the Paisley weavers were unemployed, and capital and labor were arrayed against each other. Some of the turbulent spirits among his fellow weavers induced the enthusiastic young Wilson to use his talent for verse making to abuse the capitalists. Several poems of his, portraying in no flattering light certain local petty tyrants, were adjudged libelous, and Wilson, who manfully acknowledged their authorship, was fined heavily, and condemned to burn the poems in public. Being unable to pay the fine, he was sent to jail.

In this hour of gloom, Wilson's eyes were turned to the New World. Attracted by the chances for winning his way open to a free man in a new country, he determined to emigrate. Accordingly, he and his nephew, William Duncan, sailed from Belfast Loch, Friday, May 23, 1794, and after a voyage of over seven weeks landed at Newcastle, Delaware. Wilson was then twenty-eight years old. He and young Duncan went first to Wilmington, and from there to Philadelphia, looking for employment at weaving. At the latter place, he writes in his first letter home to his father and step-mother, "we made a more vigorous search than ever for weavers, and found, to our astonishment, that, though the city contains between forty and fifty thousand people, there is not twenty weavers among the whole, and these had no conveniences for journeymen, nor seemed to wish for any: so, after we had spent every farthing we had, and saw no hopes of anything being done that way, we took the first offer of employment we could find, and have continued so since." This employment was in the shop of a copper-plate printer. The above quoted letter was a long and very newsy one, and contains Wilson's first observation of the feathered creatures that were to make his fame. He writes: "As we passed through the woods on our way to Philadelphia, I did not observe one bird such as those in Scotland, but all much richer in color. We saw a great number of squirrels, snakes about a yard long, and some red birds, several of which I shot for our curiosity."

Wilson remained in his first found employment but a few weeks. After that he worked at his trade of weaving at a place ten miles north of Philadelphia, and for a short time in Virginia. In 1795 he tramped through northern New Jersey as a peddler. He had been in America but little over a year when he took up school-teaching, and at this occupation he succeeded remarkably well, although it gave him only a scanty income. He first opened a school at Frankford, but soon gave it up to become master of the school at Milestown, in Philadelphia County, where he taught for