AUDUBON AND BOONE. 129 



Fulmar and the Frigate bird. If you endeavor to approach 

 these birds in their haunts, they betake themselves to flight, 

 and speed to places where they are secure from your in- 

 trusion. 



But the scarcer the fruit, the more prized it is ; and seldom 

 have I experienced greater pleasures than when on the Florida 

 Keys, under a bui'ning sun, after pushing my bark for miles 

 over a soapy flat, I have striven all day long, tormented by 

 myriads of insects, to procure a heron new to me, and have 

 at length succeeded in my efi'orts. And then how amply are 

 the labors of the naturalist compensated, when, after observ- 

 ing the wildest and most distrustful birds, in their remote and 

 almost inaccessible breeding places, he returns from his jour- 

 neys, and relates his adventures to an interested and friendly 

 audience. 



It is thus the miraculous fidelity which characterises his whole 

 work, could only have been attained. His life is full of such 

 incidents. It was indeed a habit from which he never devi- 

 ated throughout the long years of his faithful dedication to his 

 art, to make his drawings, if possible, on the very spot where 

 the specimens had been obtained, without regard to heat, or 

 cold, or storm. In making his drawings of the Golden Eagle, 

 his incessant application through many hours of hurried 

 labor, without rest, threw him into a violent fit of illness 

 which quite nearly cost him his life. In many other instances 

 he sufi'ered greatly. He sometimes worked, while in Labra- 

 dor, until the pencil absolutely dropped from his stifi"ened 

 fingers, frozen in that bitter air ; and so it was in the South, 

 his exposure to the opposite extremes were quite as great. 



But it is by contrasting his own accounts of his visit to 



Labrador and the Florida Keys, that we will best be enabled 



to apprehend the rugged zeal of his out-door methods in these 



widely separated regions. A visit to Labrador, which is the 



nesting-ground of a vast number of our migratory birds, 



having become necessary to the continuation of his work, the 



9 



