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THE LOST PORTFOLIO. 



While I was at Natchez, on the 31st of December 1820, my kind 

 friend Nicholas Berthoud, Esq. proposed to me to accompany him in 

 his keel-boat to New Orleans. At one o'clock, the steam-boat Columbus 

 hauled off from the landing, and took our bark in tow. The steamer was 

 soon ploughing along at full speed, and little else engaged our minds than 

 the thought of our soon arriving at the emporium of the commerce of the 

 Mississippi. Towards evening, however, several inquiries were made re- 

 specting particular portions of the luggage, among which ought to have 

 been one of my portfolios containing a number of drawings made by me 

 while gliding down the Ohio and Mississippi from Cincinnati to Natchez, 

 and of which some were to me peculiarly valuable, being of birds previ- 

 ously unfigured, and perhaps undescribed. The portfolio was nowhere 

 to be found, and I recollected that I had brought it under my arm to the 

 margin of the stream, and there left it to the care of one of my friend's 

 servants, who, in the hurry of our departure, had neglected to take it on 

 board. Besides the drawings of birds, there was in this collection a sketch 

 in black chalk, to which I always felt greatly attached while from home. 

 It is true the features which it represented were indelibly engraved in my 

 heart ; but the portrait of her to whom I owe so much of the happiness 

 that I have enjoyed was not the less dear to me. When I thought du- 

 ring the following night of the loss I had sustained in consequence of my 

 own negligence, imagined the possible fate of the collection, and saw it in 

 the hands of one of the numerous boatmen lounging along the shores, 

 who might paste the drawings to the walls of his cabin, nail them to the 

 steering-oars of his flat-boat, or distribute them among his fellows, I felt 

 little less vexed than I did some years before when the rats, as you know, 

 devoured a much larger collection. 



It was useless to fret myself, and so I began to devise a scheme for 

 recovering the drawings. I wrote to Mr Garnier and my venerable 

 friend Charles Carre'. Mr Berthoud also wrote to a mercantile ac- 

 quaintance. The letters were forwarded to Natchez from the first land- 

 ing place at which we stopped, and in the course of time we reached the 

 great eddy running by the Levee or artificial embankmient at New Orleans. 

 But before I present you with the answers to the letters sent to our ac- 



