SCHOOL DAYS IN FRANCE 91 



by concrete examples and fostered, as it often is, by 

 lofty purposes and the uplift of a high ideal. 



Audubon's life affords a striking proof of the power 

 which environment can exert in awakening dormant 

 capacity, in developing talents to their full and calling 

 into use every force held in reserve. When we consider 

 what his life work finally became, and what he eventu- 

 ally accomplished in a field for which he had no train- 

 ing, except in drawing, we find it easier to wonder 

 at the man than to criticize him. With a formal school- 

 ing in France of the slenderest sort, in which the writ- 

 ing of his own language was never completely mastered, 

 at eighteen he came to America and adopted a new 

 tongue, which he first heard from the Quakers. Twenty 

 years more were to elapse before he had a definite plan, — 

 during which his environment was mainly that of a 

 trader and storekeeper in the backwoods, never remote 

 from the white man's frontier, hardly the soil one would 

 seek for the development of budding talents in art, lit- 

 erature or science. Failure in trade was one of the 

 spurs which started Audubon on his ultimate career, 

 for it led to the immediate development of the talents 

 which he possessed ; the encouragement which he received 

 from his wife was undoubtedly another. When he final- 

 ly emerged, like a somewhat wild but well ripened fruit, 

 at the age of forty, rich in experience, ready to absorb 

 what from lack of earlier motives or opportunities he 

 had failed to acquire, and with the determination to 

 succeed, he won recognition as much through his person- 

 ality and enthusiasm as by his extraordinary versatility 

 and talents. 



In an early sketch of his life Audubon said that his 

 father had given both him and his sister an education 

 appropriate to his purse; his teachers were possessed of 



