320 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 



plan did not appeal to his practical wife, who had many 

 friends at Cincinnati, where she was assured of a good 

 income through her teaching; Mrs. Audubon also felt 

 that to be constantly shifting about was anything but 

 favorable to the education of their children. Her re- 

 luctance, however, gave way, and in December she 

 joined her husband in New Orleans, but only to find 

 that the city could afford them no settled means of sup- 

 port. The situation of the Audubon family during the 

 winter of 1821-22 became precarious in the extreme, and 

 for two months Audubon gave up his habit of journal- 

 izing, one reason being that he could not afford the 

 paltry sum necessary to buy a blank book for this pur- 

 pose. 



Compelled at last to make a new move, Audubon 

 started for Natchez, on the 16th of March, 1822, paying 

 for his passage on the steamer Eckit by doing a crayon 

 portrait of the captain and his wife. It was while going 

 up the river at this time that he opened a chest containing 

 two hundred of his drawings to find them sadly dam- 

 aged by the breaking of a bottle of gunpowder, but the 

 loss then sustained was apparently slight in comparison 

 with that which he had experienced in an earlier disaster. 

 To follow his account of this earlier and better known 

 incident, when leaving Henderson for Philadelphia, 

 he carefully placed all of his drawings in a wooden 

 box and entrusted them to the care of a friend, with in- 

 junction that no harm should befall them; upon return- 

 ing several months later, his treasure chest was opened, 

 but only to reveal that "a pair of Norway rats had taken 

 possession of the whole, and had reared a young family 

 amongst the gnawed bits of paper, which but a few 

 months before represented nearly a thousand inhabi- 

 tants of the air." The heat that was immediately felt 



