Mucli may be passed. Audubon returned to America, and as a preliminary 

 to marriage and acting under the advice of the father of his affianced, he tried to 

 tit himself for a mercantile business, but it did not suit him. Birds, not business, 

 were in his head. Before he had sailed for France he had begun a series of 

 drawings of the birds of .America and had begim a study of their habits. He was 

 mapried in the year of 1808 in Philadelphia, and the next morning, with his bride, 

 left for Louisville, Kentucky. He still intended to follow a business career, and 

 with Ferdinand Rf)zier he ojKMied a store in the Kentucky metropolis, which, as 

 .'\udubon writes, "went on prosperously when I attended to it, but birds were 

 birds then as now. and my thoughts were ever and anon turning towards them 

 as objects of my greatest delight." 



During the time that .\udubon passed in Louisville he made constant excur- 

 sions into the woods and fields. He was drawing birds and studying their habits 

 in life constantly. His heart was with nature and the store was a burden. When 

 he was forced to go to Philadelphia or New York In purchase goods he enjoyed 

 the journeys only, as he confessed, as they afforded liim the means "to study birds 

 and their habits as I traveled through the beautiful, the darling forests of Ohio, 

 Kentucky and Pennsylvania." 



More than once Audubon allowed iiis pack horses, "laden with goods and 

 dollars," to become lost to sight and in danger of being lost beyond recovery, while 

 he stopped to watch the activities and to admire the colorings of some woodland 

 warbler. 



Pecuniary difficulties overtook the naturalist. He did not attempt, as a man 

 of steadier business method might have attempted, to find a really serious means 

 of recouping his losses. In a letter he says: "Your mother was well, both of 

 you were lovely darlings of our hearts, and the effects of poverty troubled us 

 not." The naturalist continued to make his pictures of birds and quadrupeds, 

 and while his friends and relatives doubtless thought that his drawings and his 

 forest excursions were a waste, possibly a willful waste, of time, they proved to 

 be the basis of his future fame. 



The Audubons went to Henderson, Kentucky, and then there was a new 

 business venture, a steam mill, which he declares to his sons in a letter was "of 

 all the follies of a man one of the greatest, and to your uncle and to me the worst 

 of all our pecuniary misfortunes." Audubon worked hard at his mill, but he 

 called it afterward the "bad establishment." He parted finally with every particle 

 of property to his creditors, paying the last dollar that he owed and leaving 

 Henderson with only his clothes and his original drawings. Of his wife, he says 

 she felt the pangs "of our misfortune, but never for an hour lost her courage: 

 her brave and cheerful spirit accepted all, and no reproaches from her beloved 

 lips ever wounded my heart. With her was I not always rich?" 



.\udubon, as he expressed himself, was not inclined to foolish despair. He 

 resorted to his talents, and for some time he drew portraits, managing thus to 

 eke out a living, and still giving over as much time as he could to the drawing of 



408 



