106 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 



Young Audubon lived at "Mill Grove" from the win- 

 ter of 1804 to the spring of 1805, and again for a few 

 months in the summer of 1806, the year of its final sale 

 by the Audubons and Roziers (see p. 148). In his 

 journal of 1820 the naturalist wrote that his father had 

 once the honor of being presented to General Washing- 

 ton, and also to Major Crogan, of Kentucky, "who was 

 particularly well acquainted with him." Jean Audubon 

 left at "Mill Grove" oil portraits of himself and of 

 Washington, both by an inferior American artist named 

 Polk, 10 and it is probable that the one of himself was 

 painted while he was at Philadelphia in the spring of 

 1789; the drawing is hard and flat, but the appearance 

 of the face clearly indicates a man past middle life, and 

 Captain Audubon had then reached his forty-fifth year. 



Young Audubon, we may be sure, lost no time in 

 exploring the resources of this fine estate, where every 

 bird, tree and flower came to him as a new discovery. 

 In following the Perkioming above the mill dam he 

 found a cave, carved out of the rocks, as he thought, by 

 nature's own hand, which was a favorite haunt of the 

 unpretentious but friendly pewees, the first American 

 birds to attract his serious attention. So delighted was 

 the youthful naturalist that he decided to make the pe- 

 wees' cave his study; thither accordingly he brought his 

 books, pencils and paper, and there made his first studies 

 of American bird life, in the spring of 1804, in the third 



at Nantes, agreed to keep the house in good repair from that time onward. 

 It was the Prevost mortgage that Miers Fisher paid but forgot to cancel 

 (see Vol. I, p. 122) ; it was finally cleared up by Dacosta in October, 1806. 



Miers Fisher's Philadelphia residence, called "Ury," which Audubon 

 often visited, was near Fox Chase, now in the Twenty-third Ward. See 

 Witmer Stone, Cassinia, No. xvii (Philadelphia, 1913). 



10 For a photograph of this portrait of Lieutenant Audubon here repro- 

 duced, I am indebted to Miss Maria R. Audubon; the originals of both 

 portraits are now in possession of Audubon's granddaughter, Mrs. Morris 

 F. Tyler. 



