108 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 



said, " I may not see it finished, but my children will, and 

 you may please to add my name to your list of subscribers." 

 The young people exhibited a mingled expression of joy and 

 sorrow, and when I with them strove to dispel the cloud that 

 seemed to hang over their father's mind, he smiled, bade me 

 be sure to see that the whole work should be punctually de- 

 livered, and took his leave. The solemnity of his manner I 

 could not forget for several days ; I often thought that neither 

 might I see the work completed, but at length I exclaimed, 

 " My sons may." And now that another volume, both of my 

 Illustrations and of my Biographies is finished, my trust in 

 Providence is augmented, and I cannot but hope that myself 

 and my family together may be permitted to see the comple- 

 tion of my labors. 



How that prayer has been answered, the facts since, with 

 which the world is familiar, have shown. He obtained one 

 hundred and eighty subscribers to the work at one thousand 

 dollars each ; and lived not only to complete it, surrounded by 

 his sons, but, as I have already mentioned, had by their aid 

 commenced and even completed another great work on the 

 Quadrupeds of America. 



It is not the least extraordinary characteristic of this man's 

 unexampled career, that he should, until even late in life, 

 have been entirely unconscious of the powers he possessed. 

 Indeed, he repeatedly asserts, that it was not until his meet- 

 ing with Charles Lucien Bonaparte, on his visit to Philadel- 

 phia in 1824, that he had any thought, whatever, of pub- 

 lishing, or dreamed that he had been accomplishing anything 

 very extraordinary. Bonaparte was astonished, — astounded, 

 even, in looking over his portfolio of drawings, and exclaimed, 

 in an irrepressible burst of admiration and wonder at the 

 simplicity of his unconsciousness, — 



" Mr. Audubon, do you know that you are a great man, — 

 a very great man ! — The greatest ornithologist in the world?" 



It was this language that first filled him with the thought 



