A MEETING OF RIVALS 219 



250 subscribers; it was then that his publishers decided 

 to extend the original edition of his work to 500 copies. 

 His longer and more perilous journey of 1810, when his 

 meeting with Audubon occurred, has already been de- 

 scribed. In 1812, after the sixth volume of the Orni- 

 thology had appeared, he again resumed his travels in 

 the East and went as far north as Burlington, on Lake 

 Champlain ; at Haverhill, New Hampshire, he was sum- 

 marily arrested and thrown into jail, the people of the 

 town, utterly unable to comprehend the nature of his 

 pursuits, suspecting that in his real capacity he was act- 

 ing as a spy in the employ of the Canadian Government. 

 The seventh and last volume of the Ornithology which 

 Wilson lived to complete made its appearance in the 

 spring of 1813. He had then been obliged to relinquish 

 his work on the Cyclopcedia, and was reduced to the pit- 

 tance derived from the coloring of his own plates. 



Alexander Wilson died at Philadelphia, after a brief 

 illness, on August 23, 1813. A story was current that 

 his end was saddened, if not hastened, by the dishonesty 

 of his publishers, but I cannot vouch for it. Audubon 

 may have had this report in mind when he wrote his 

 name in the hotel register at Niagara Falls 11 on August 

 24, 1824 ; and added that he would never die, like Wilson, 

 "under the lash of a bookseller." Even as late as 1879 

 Miss Malvina Lawson, daughter of Wilson's friend and 

 engraver, left no doubt as to her belief when she wrote : 

 "and to his other trials was added the fact that killed 

 him, the dishonesty of his publisher." 12 



When we consider that Wilson's entire working pe- 

 riod on the Ornithology was not over ten years, and that 



11 See Vol. I, p. 340. 



"See a letter to Professor S. S. Haldeman, dated February 6, 1879, 

 in Penn Monthly, vol. x (Philadelphia, 1879). 



