AUDUBON'S FAMILY IN AMERICA 295 



growing families on their mother's estate; Victor's was 

 placed just north of the original homestead, and John's 

 not far away. On the slope behind John Audubon's 

 house, a small building, later known as the "Cave," was 

 specially constructed for the safer keeping of the famous 

 copper plates, which had already passed through fire, 4 

 and not wholly unscathed. Mr. John Hardin, now 

 (1915) a serene and clear-eyed man of eighty-four, who 

 settled in that neighborhood in 1852 and who was inter- 

 mittently employed by the younger Audubons for a 

 decade, has told me that he boxed with his own hands 

 all of the copper plates, after wrapping each in tissue 

 paper, and stored them in that building; whenever John 

 Audubon w r anted a plate, John Hardin would go to 

 the "Cave" and get it for him. 



In 1856 Victor Audubon published a second reduced 

 edition of his father's Birds of America, in which the 

 text and plates of the first octavo were reproduced with 

 little or no change. At about that time Victor suffered 

 an injury to the spine, 5 and after 1857 he was com- 

 pletely invalided; he died in his own home, August 18, 

 1860. 



To quote the daughter of John W. Audubon : 6 



During this long period of my uncle's illness all the care 

 of both families devolved on my father. Never a "business 

 man," saddened by his brother's condition, and utterly unable 

 to manage, at the same time, a fairly large estate, the publica- 

 tion of two illustrated works, every plate of which he felt he 



4 See Vol. II, p. 267. 



5 Due, it was believed, to a fall into the "well" (now guarded by an 

 iron rail), which led to a basement window of his house, though one 

 who knew John W. Audubon well, said that Victor's illness resulted from 

 a fall from a railroad train; see Jacob Pentz (Bibl. No. 81), Shooting 

 and Fishing, May 11, 1893. 



8 Maria R. Audubon, in biographical memoir of her father in Audubon's 

 Western Journal, 1849-1850 (Bibl. No. 219). 



