2 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 



We landed on the 3d . . . [of September] after a re- 

 markably fine passage of 33 days. In two days more I pro- 

 ceed to the woods, and away from white man's tracks and 

 manners. I hope you are going on well with your work. . . . 

 I have a new subscriber here. The papers and scientific 

 journals (we have not many,) are singing the praises of my 

 work, and, God willing, I may yet come out at the broad end 

 of the horn; at all events, I will either break it or rnake a 

 spoon! I shot sixteen birds on the passage, which I got through 

 the kind attention of our commander. I kiUed fifty more, 

 when the "Columbia" was going too fast to stop for the pur- 

 pose of picking them up. My young man is now busily engaged 

 in skinning, and killed a bag-full of warblers yesterday . . . 

 prices of peaches, first quality, 75 cents per bushel, — apples, 

 half that price ; — water melons are dull of sale, as also cante- 

 lopes and nutmeg melons. Fish alive in the markets, and, 

 vive la joie, no taxes on shooting or fishing." 



What Audubon actually did was to proceed to 

 Philadelphia, where Mrs. Audubon left him to visit her 

 sons in Louisville, and where he laid his plans for ex- 

 ploring the Southern States, especially the islands and 

 eastern coast of the Florida peninsula. For this expedi- 

 tion he engaged two assistants, one of whom was Henry 

 Ward, the "young man" mentioned above, an English- 

 man who had come with him to America as taxidermist, 

 while the other was George Lehman, a Swiss landscape 

 painter whom he seems to have found at Philadelphia. 

 With them he soon started for Washington to obtain 

 assistance from the Government. 



On the very day that Audubon landed in New York, 

 there appeared in the London Literary Gazette a serio- 

 comic notice under the title of "Wilson the Ornitholo- 

 gist," who, it may be remembered, had died in Phila- 

 delphia eighteen years before. Said the editor of the 

 Gazette: 



