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94 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 



moment my eyes took in the noble contour of that Roman 

 face, I felt that it was Ae, and could be no one else. Yes, it 

 was Audubon in his wilderness garb, hale and alert, with 

 sixty winters upon his shoulders, as one of his own "old 

 eagles, feathered to the heel," — fresh from where the floods 

 are cradled amid crag-piled glooms, or flowery extended 

 plains ! 



He looked as I had dreamed the antique Plato must have 

 looked, with that fine, classic head and lofty mien ! He 

 fully realized the hero of the ideal. With what eager and 

 afi'ectionate admiration I gazed upon him, the valorous and 

 venerable Sage ! 



What a deathless and beautiful dedication his had been to 

 the holy priesthood of nature ! I felt that the very hem of 

 his garments — of that rusty and faded green blanket, ought 

 to be sacred to all devotees of science, and was so to me. 



What an indomitable flame, that not 



" The wreakful siege of battering years" 



could quell, must fire that heroic heart. To think, that now, 

 when " Time had delved its parallels upon his brow" — when 

 he had already accomplished the most Herculean labor of the 

 age in his "Birds of America" — still unsatisfied, he should 

 undertake a new, and as grand a work, upon the animals ; 

 and now he was returning with the trophies of science gath- 

 ered on his toilsome and dangerous journeyings ! 



Ah, how I venerated him ! How I longed to know him, 

 and to be permitted to sit at his feet and learn, and hear his 

 own lips discourse of those loveable themes which had so 

 absorbed my life. 



I scarcely slept that night, for my brain was teeming with 

 novel and happy images. I determined to stretch to the 

 utmost the traveller's license, and approach him in the morn- 

 ing. My happy fortune in having been able to make the 

 " surrender " in his favor, assisted me, or else his quick eye 



