Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/420

406 of the people and places that he visited, are delightfully recorded in the letters which Mr. Grosart collected.

At Hanover, Pa., he met a judge who condemned his work because "it was not within the reach of the commonality, and therefore inconsistent with our republican institutions." Wilson turned the tables on this learned man by showing that the judge's elegant three-story brick house was open to the same objection; and then in a more serious vein pointed out to him the benefit which a young, rising nation can derive from science, "till he began to show such symptoms of intellect as to seem ashamed of what he said." From Pittsburg Wilson made his way in a skiff down the Ohio over seven hundred miles, nearly to Louisville, stopping at the important towns on the way.

At Louisville one of the persons on whom he called was Audubon, then thirty years old and engaged in business. Audubon has left an account of this meeting, in which he thus describes Wilson's physical appearance: "How well do I remember him as he walked up to me! His long, rather hooked nose, the keenness of his eyes, and his prominent cheek-bones, stamped his countenance with a peculiar character. ... His stature was not above the middle size." Audubon claims that he was about to subscribe for the "Ornithology," but a complimentary reference to his own knowledge of birds, spoken in French by his partner, checked him. "Vanity and the encomium of my friend prevented me from subscribing," he writes, and to this he adds that he lent some of his drawings to Wilson, and hunted with him, obtaining some birds which the latter had never seen before. Audubon states also that being in Philadelphia some time afterward he called on Wilson, who received him with civility, but did not speak of birds or drawings. Against this story must be set the following extract from Wilson's diary published in the ninth volume of the "Ornithology": "March 23d, I bade adieu to Louisville, to which place I had four letters of recommendation, and was taught to expect much of everything there; but neither received one act of civility from those to whom I was recommended, one subscriber, nor one new bird; though I delivered my letters, ransacked the woods repeatedly, and visited all the characters likely to subscribe. Science or literature has not one friend in this place." "We must take Audubon's account," says his own biographer, Robert Buchanan, "cum grano salis," while Grosart, eager in defense of Wilson, does not hesitate to call it "a tissue of lies," except his admission that vanity kept him from subscribing to Wilson's work.

Turning southward, Wilson crossed Kentucky to Tennessee, and proceeded through the Chickasaw and Choctaw countries to Natchez, and thence went to New Orleans.