btained in France. In the hunt it was Audubon--dressed,
perhaps, in satin breeches and pumps, for he was a great dandy--who
led the way through the almost unbroken wilderness. Add to this
that he was an expert swimmer, once swimming the Schuylkill with a
companion on his back; that he could play any one of half a dozen
instruments for an impromptu dance; that he could plait a set of
picnic dishes out of willow rushes; train dogs, and do a hundred other
clever things, and it is easy to see why he was a general favorite.

His private rooms were turned into a museum. The walls were covered
with festoons of birds' eggs, the shelves crowded with fishes, snakes,
lizards, and frogs; the chimney displayed stuffed squirrels and
opossums, and wherever there was room hung his own paintings of birds.
It was the holiday of life for the young lover of nature, and he
enjoyed it with good will.

Here the idea of his great work came to him as he was one day looking
over his drawings and descriptions of birds. Suddenly, as it seemed to
him, though his whole life had led to it, he conceived the plan of a
great work on American ornithology. He began his gigantic undertaking
as a master in the school of nature wherein he had been so faithful a
student, for he now saw with joy that the past, which had often seemed
idle, had been in reality rich with labors that were to bear fruit.

He began at once to put his work into scientific form, and nothing
better illustrates his energy and ambition than the fact that he
entered on it alone and unaided, though none knew better than he the
toil and ceaseless endeavor necessary for its completion. Except in a
very immature form, American ornithology at that time did not exist;
it was a region almost as unknown to human thought as the new world
which Columbus discovered. Season after season, from the Gulf to
Canada and back again, these winged creatures of the air wended their
way, stopping to hatch and breed their young, becoming acquainted with
Louisiana orange-groves and New England apple-orchards, now fluttering
with kindly sociability round the dwellings of men and again seeking
lonely eeries among inaccessible mountain tops, pursuing their course
at all times almost without the thought and cognizance of man. It was
Audubon who was the conqueror, if not the discoverer of this aerial
world of song, of which he became the immortal historian. It was
his untiring zeal which gave thus early to American