210 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 



The story is told that while they made their 

 way through the woods of Delaware, Wilson 

 shot a Red-headed Woodpecker and met with 

 the Cardinal Grosbeak; as he often referred to the 

 pleasure which the sight of these beautiful birds had 

 given him, the incident, if it really occurred, may have 

 played a part in the inspiration, which later came to 

 Wilson, of becoming the historian of American bird 

 life. 



After eight hard years of shifting about, during 

 which Wilson tried day-labor, weaving, peddling and 

 school teaching, working long hours at miserable pay, he 

 finally settled as a country school teacher near New 

 York. On the twelfth of July, 1801, he wrote to a fellow 

 teacher and friend, Charles Orr, who was then living at 

 Philadelphia: "I live six miles from Newark and twelve 

 miles from New York, in a settlement of canting, 

 preaching, praying, and snivelling ignorant Presbyte- 

 rians. They pay their minister 250 pounds for preach- 

 ing twice a week, and their teacher 40 dollars a quarter 

 ' for the most spirit-sinking, laborious work 6, I may 

 say 12 times weekly." To the same friend, in 1802, 

 he confided: "My disposition is to love those who love 

 me with all the warmth of enthusiasm, but to feel with 

 the keenest sensibility the smallest appearance of neglect 

 or contempt from those I regard." 



In 1802, at the age of thirty-six, Wilson decided to 

 take up a school at Gray's Ferry, on the Schuylkill 

 River, in Kingsessing Township, then a small settlement 

 four miles from Philadelphia. A year later, in 1803, 

 John James Audubon was sent to America to learn 

 English and enter trade, and, as chance would have it, 

 settled on the banks of the same river, not many miles 

 from Wilson's old schoolhouse. In one respect the 



