lxii AUDUBON THE NATURALIST 



obliterated those two lines and changed "married" to "remar- 

 ried" was determined to make it appear that Captain Audubon 

 had been first married to his boy's mother, and that after her 

 death he took their child to France, where he was married again, 

 this time to the woman who became the boy's stepmother, when 

 the truth, as Audubon had stated it, was just the opposite. 



A few years later, about 1824, when Audubon and his wife 

 were living at "Beechwoods," a plantation near St. Francisville, 

 Louisiana, the wife of his old friend and former clerk, Dr. 

 Nathaniel Wells Pope, left a record of her reminiscences, quoted 

 by Stanley Clisby Arthur, in which she said that Audubon had 

 often described to her the cottage in which he was born that 

 was situated on the banks of the Mississippi River, in Lower 

 Louisiana, and surrounded by orange trees. 



At Oxford in 1828 a lady who wanted his autograph asked 

 Audubon to write his name and the date of his birth. The 

 latter, he said, he could not do, "except approximately," and 

 his hostess "was greatly amused that he should not know." As 

 I have already noted, Audubon appears to have told Mr. Hay, 

 a friend at Edinburgh, in March, 1827, that he was born in 

 one of the French colonies. 



In the Introduction to the first volume of his Ornithological 

 Biography, Audubon, who was under no necessity of saying 

 anything about his birth, made the vague affirmation, "I re- 

 ceived life and light in the New World," and continued : "When 

 I had hardly yet learned to walk, and to articulate those first 

 words always so endearing to parents, the productions of na- 

 ture that lay spread all around, were constantly pointed out 

 to me" ; and in the biographical sketch "Myself" he wrote that 

 "the first of my recollective powers placed me in the central 

 portion of the city of Nantes, on the Loire River, in France." 



Again, in the Introduction to the second volume of the 

 Ornithological Biography, Audubon spoke of America as "the 

 land of my birth," and as the country in which "my eyes first 

 opened to the light." 



How do such statements support the theory that Audubon 



