ATJDUBON 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 burning 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 efforts. 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 suffered greatly. He sometimes worked, while in Labra- 

 dor, until the pencil absolutely dropped from his stiffened 

 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 

 Lebrador 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 



