is counted as one of the
greatest generals known in history, and his fame will never die.

The little Robert E. Lee, who rode the mustang pony, is now a
gray-haired man. He has written the life of his father and has told how
General Lee became a college president after the War. The students loved
their president as well as the soldiers loved their general, and they
always felt proud of him as he went galloping past them on dear old
Traveller after the duties were over for the day. Good old Traveller
deserved a medal, if ever a horse did, for sharing the dangers of her
gallant master, General Robert E. Lee.

JOHN JAMES AUDUBON

Have you ever happened to see a book that cost a thousand dollars?

A man who loved birds and knew a great deal about them drew pictures of
all the kinds to be found in our country, calling these drawings, when
they were colored and bound together _The Birds of North America_. It
took four volumes to hold all these pictures, and each one of these
books costs a thousand dollars. There were only seventy-five or eighty
of these sets of bird books made, but you can see them in the Boston
Public Library, the Lenox and Astor libraries in New York city, and at
several colleges and private homes. Each one of these books is more than
three feet long and a little over two feet wide, and is so heavy that it
takes two strong men to lift it on to a rack when some one wants to look
at the pictures. If you should look through all four books, you would
see more than a thousand kinds of birds, all drawn as big as life, and
each one colored like the bird itself.

You may be sure it took the maker of these books many, many years to
travel all over the United States to find such a number of birds. The
man's name was John James Audubon. He slept in woods, waded through
marshes and swamps, tramped hundreds of miles, and suffered many
hardships before he could learn the colors and habits of so many birds.
He always said his love for birds began when his pet parrot was killed.

It happened this way.

One morning when John James was about four years old and his nurse was
giving him his breakfast, the little parrot Mignonne, who said a lot of
words as plainly as a child, asked for some bread and milk. A tame
monkey who was in the room happened to be angry and sulking over
something. He sprang at Mignonne, who screamed for help. Little John
James shouted too, and begged his nurse to save the bird, but before