AUDUBON'S FAMILY IN AMERICA 295 



growing families on their mother's estate ; Victor's was 

 placed just north of the original homestead, and John's 

 not far away* On the slope behind John Audubon's 

 house, a small building, later known as the "Cave," was 

 specially constructed for the safer keeping of the famous 

 copper plates, which had already passed through fire,* 

 and not wholly unscathed. Mr. John Hardin, now 

 (1915) a serene and clear-eyed man of eighty-four, who 

 settled in that neighborhood in 1852 and who was inter- 

 mittently employed by the younger Audubons for a 

 decade, has told me that he boxed with his own hands 

 all of the copper plates, after wrapping each in tissue 

 paper, and stored them in that building; whenever John 

 Audubon wanted a plate, John Hardin would go to 

 the "Cave" and get it for him. 



In 1856 Victor Audubon published a second reduced 

 edition of his father's Birds of America j in which the 

 text and plates of the first octavo were reproduced with 

 little or no change. At about that time Victor suffered 

 an injury to the spine,^ and after 1857 he was com- 

 pletely invalided; he died in his own home, August 18, 

 1860. 



To quote the daughter of John W. Audubon: ® 



During this long period of my uncle's illness all the care 

 of both families devolved on my father. Never a "business 

 man," saddened by his brother's condition, and utterly unable 

 to manage, at the same time, a fairly large estate, the publica- 

 tion of two illustrated works, every plate of which he felt he 



♦See Vol. II, p. 267. 



"Due, it was believed, to a fall into the "well" (now guarded by an 

 iron rail), which led to a basement window of his house, though one 

 who knew John W. Audubon well, said that Victor's illness resulted from 

 a fall from a railroad train; see Jacob Pentz (Bibl. No. 81), Shooting 

 and Pishing, May 11, 1893. 



" Maria R. Audubon, in biographical memoir of her father in Audubon's 

 Western Journal, 1849-1850 (Bibl. No. 219). 



