18 Henshaw, In Memoriam: William Brewster. is«n.. 



Point, near the foot of the Lake, where numbers of his ornithological 

 friends visited him. He also had built for service on the Lake a 

 houseboat designed with reference to comfort and his special needs 

 as a student of bird life. He cultivated a wide acquaintance with 

 the guides and lumbermen of the district, and not the least of its 

 many attractions was the opportunity afforded of meeting these 

 men annually on their own ground and hearing from their lips the 

 story of their experiences and of still earlier days in the wilderness. 

 He was particularly fond of canoeing on the Lake and made much 

 use of the canoe in his daily trips. Indeed some of the accounts of 

 birds which he wrote for his 'Birds of UmbagogLake' were penned 

 as he floated here and there on the Lake's placid bosom, with the 

 setting of the bird biographies he was engaged upon spread out 

 before his very eyes. 



With the lapse of time, however, Brewster's interest in that 

 region lessened, chiefly because of the influx of visitors and campers, 

 who were attracted in ever increasing numbers by the growing 

 fame of the region. Aloofness and solitude had been its chiefest 

 charms, and when these departed little was left to a man of Brew- 

 ster's temperament, so that during the later years of his life, after 

 1900, he never revisited it. 



Brewster made a trip to Ritchie County, West Virginia, in 1874, 

 in company with Ruthven Deane and Ernest Ingersoll. They 

 were there from April 25 to May 9, and the party secured many 

 nests, eggs and bird skins. Brewster published a paper in the 

 Annals of the Lyceum of Natural History of New York on the 

 results obtained in this, then little known, region. As was the case 

 with most of his faunal papers, this article contained copious notes 

 on the habits and songs of many of the species included. 



In April 1878, he visited his friend Robert Ridgway, at Mount 

 Carmel, Illinois, and spent a month or more with him in collecting 

 birds and gathering notes on a number of species until then 

 unknown to him. Notable among the strangers was the beautiful 

 Prothonotary Warbler, which inspired the greatest enthusiasm. 

 For an interesting account of this bird, written in his best vein, the 

 reader is referred to his article in the Bulletin of the Nuttall Club 

 for October 1878. He always dwelt with great pleasure on the 

 incidents of this trip, and spoke fondly of the delightful comradeship 

 of Ridewav. 



