208 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 



Because of the peculiar relations which existed between 

 these two pioneers, we must follow the history of the 

 elder man a little more closely. 



Alexander Wilson was the son of a weaver at Pais- 

 ley, Scotland, where he was born in 1766; he was thus 

 Audubon's senior by nineteen years. His father, who 

 was esteemed for his honesty and intelligence, had tasted 

 prosperity, but irremediable poverty fell to his lot in 

 later life. Alexander, the younger son, was motherless 

 at ten, and the stepmother that soon appeared seems 

 to have shown him scant sympathy, or, at all events, 

 never won his affection. Alexander Wilson's youth 

 unhappily coincided with an era of bad feeling in his 

 native land; the times were hard in bonny Scotland, 

 education was stagnant, and the public morals were 

 debased. Wilson was a child of his times; like thou- 

 sands of other youths, he was bound to suffer from the 

 conditions of his early environment, but unlike many 

 thousands of his day, he was possessed of talents and 

 ambition which bitter adversity tended to sharpen and 

 could never repress. 



At thirteen young Wilson was taken from school and 

 apprenticed to a weaver, William Duncan, his brother- 

 in-law, and for three years he was no stranger to hard 

 work and the birchen rod. For nearly three years more, 

 as master weaver, he knew little beyond the grind and 

 grime of the factory and the society of factory hands. 

 At eighteen, however, his rebellious spirit struck, and 

 for ten years he appeared in the role of itinerant peddler, 

 poet and orator, and as socialist to the extent of cham- 

 pioning the oppressed weaver class. At one time Wil- 

 son came into correspondence with Robert Burns and 

 later made his acquaintance. His best dialect poem, 

 "Watty and Meg, or The Taming of a Shrew," pub- 



