Audubon and his Journals, Volume 1 (of 2). John James Audubon

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СКАЧАТЬ in black chalk, and, thanks to my master, David, succeeded admirably. I commenced at exceedingly low prices, but raised these prices as I became more known in this capacity. Your mother and yourselves were sent up from Henderson to our friend Isham Talbot, then Senator for Kentucky; this was done without a cent of expense to me, and I can never be grateful enough for his kind generosity.

      In the course of a few weeks I had as much work to do as I could possibly wish, so much that I was able to rent a house in a retired part of Louisville. I was sent for four miles in the country, to take likenesses of persons on their death-beds, and so high did my reputation suddenly rise, as the best delineator of heads in that vicinity, that a clergyman residing at Louisville (I would give much now to recall and write down his name) had his dead child disinterred, to procure a fac-simile of his face, which, by the way, I gave to the parents as if still alive, to their intense satisfaction. My drawings of birds were not neglected meantime; in this particular there seemed to hover round me almost a mania, and I would even give up doing a head, the profits of which would have supplied our wants for a week or more, to represent a little citizen of the feathered tribe. Nay, my dear sons, I thought that I now drew birds far better than I had ever done before misfortune intensified, or at least developed, my abilities. I received an invitation to go to Cincinnati,14 a flourishing place, and which you now well know to be a thriving town in the State of Ohio. I was presented to the president of the Cincinnati College, Dr. Drake, and immediately formed an engagement to stuff birds for the museum there, in concert with Mr. Robert Best, an Englishman of great talent. My salary was large, and I at once sent for your mother to come to me, and bring you. Your dearly beloved sister Rosa died shortly afterward. I now established a large drawing-school at Cincinnati, to which I attended thrice per week, and at good prices.

      The expedition of Major Long15 passed through the city soon after, and well do I recollect how he, Messrs. T. Peale,16 Thomas Say,17 and others stared at my drawings of birds at that time.

      So industrious were Mr. Best and I that in about six months we had augmented, arranged, and finished all we could do for the museum. I returned to my portraits, and made a great number of them, without which we must have once more been on the starving list, as Mr. Best and I found, sadly too late, that the members of the College museum were splendid promisers and very bad paymasters.

      In October of 1820 I left your mother and yourselves at Cincinnati, and went to New Orleans on board a flat-boat commanded and owned by a Mr. Haromack. From this date my journals are kept with fair regularity, and if you read them you will easily find all that followed afterward.

      In glancing over these pages, I see that in my hurried and broken manner of laying before you this very imperfect (but perfectly correct) account of my early life I have omitted to tell you that, before the birth of your sister Rosa, a daughter was born at Henderson, who was called, of course, Lucy. Alas! the poor, dear little one was unkindly born, she was always ill and suffering; two years did your kind and unwearied mother nurse her with all imaginable care, but notwithstanding this loving devotion she died, in the arms which had held her so long, and so tenderly. This infant daughter we buried in our garden at Henderson, but after removed her to the Holly burying-ground in the same place.

      Hundreds of anecdotes I could relate to you, my dear sons, about those times, and it may happen that the pages that I am now scribbling over may hereafter, through your own medium, or that of some one else be published. I shall try, should God Almighty grant me life, to return to these less important portions of my history, and delineate them all with the same faithfulness with which I have written the ornithological biographies of the birds of my beloved country.

      Only one event, however, which possesses in itself a lesson to mankind, I will here relate. After our dismal removal from Henderson to Louisville, one morning, while all of us were sadly desponding, I took you both, Victor and John, from Shippingport to Louisville. I had purchased a loaf of bread and some apples; before we reached Louisville you were all hungry, and by the river side we sat down and ate our scanty meal. On that day the world was with me as a blank, and my heart was sorely heavy, for scarcely had I enough to keep my dear ones alive; and yet through these dark ways I was being led to the development of the talents I loved, and which have brought so much enjoyment to us all, for it is with deep thankfulness that I record that you, my sons, have passed your lives almost continuously with your dear mother and myself. But I will here stop with one remark.

      One of the most extraordinary things among all these adverse circumstances was that I never for a day gave up listening to the songs of our birds, or watching their peculiar habits, or delineating them in the best way that I could; nay, during my deepest troubles I frequently would wrench myself from the persons around me, and retire to some secluded part of our noble forests; and many a time, at the sound of the wood-thrush's melodies have I fallen on my knees, and there prayed earnestly to our God.

      This never failed to bring me the most valuable of thoughts and always comfort, and, strange as it may seem to you, it was often necessary for me to exert my will, and compel myself to return to my fellow-beings.

      To speak more fully on some of the incidents which Audubon here relates, I turn to one of the two journals which are all that fire has spared of the many volumes which were filled with his fine, rather illegible handwriting previous to 1826. In the earlier of these journals I read: "I went to France not only to escape Da Costa, but even more to obtain my father's consent to my marriage with my Lucy, and this simply because I thought it my moral and religious duty to do so. But although my request was immediately granted, I remained in France nearly two years. As I told you, Mr. Bakewell considered my Lucy too young (she was then but seventeen), and me too unbusiness-like to marry; so my father decided that I should remain some months with him, and on returning to America it was his plan to associate me with some one whose commercial knowledge would be of value to me.

      "My father's beautiful country seat, situated within sight of the Loire, about mid-distance between Nantes and the sea, I found quite delightful to my taste, notwithstanding the frightful cruelties I had witnessed in that vicinity, not many years previously. The gardens, greenhouses, and all appertaining to it appeared to me then as if of a superior cast; and my father's physician was above all a young man precisely after my own heart; his name was D'Orbigny, and with his young wife and infant son he lived not far distant. The doctor was a good fisherman, a good hunter, and fond of all objects in nature. Together we searched the woods, the fields, and the banks of the Loire, procuring every bird we could, and I made drawings of every one of them – very bad, to be sure, but still they were of assistance to me. The lessons which I had received from the great David18 now proved all-important to me, but what I wanted, and what I had the good fortune to stumble upon a few years later, was the knowledge of putting up my models, in true and good positions according to the ways and habits of my beautiful feathered subjects. During these happy years I managed to make drawings of about two hundred species of birds, all of which I brought to America and gave to my Lucy.19

      "At last my father associated me with Ferdinand Rozier, as you already know, and we were fairly smuggled out of France; for he was actually an officer attached to the navy of that country, and though I had a passport stating I was born at New Orleans, my French name would have swept that aside very speedily. Rozier's passport was a Dutch one, though he did not understand a single word in that language. Indeed, our passengers were a medley crowd; two days out two monks appeared among us from the hold, where our captain had concealed them."

      This same "medley crowd" appears to have comprised many refugees from the rule of Napoleon, this being about 1806, and the amusements were varied, including both gaming and dancing. To quote again: "Among the passengers was a handsome Virginian girl, young and graceful. She was constantly honored by the attentions of two Frenchmen who belonged to the nobility; both were fine СКАЧАТЬ