300 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 



and mind for a long period after her husband's death, 

 and in 1857, when in her seventieth year, she returned 

 in a degree to her old vocation of school teaching, which 

 had been so successfully followed in Ohio and Louisiana 

 when her husband was on the threshold of his extraor- 

 dinary career. Her pupils now consisted of some of her 

 nimaerous grandchildren and a few others drawn from 

 the neighborhood ; among the latter was the well known 

 writer and father of the original Audubon Society, 

 George Bird Grinnell, who pointed out to me the room 

 in Victor Audubon's old house where his revered 

 and venerable teacher had gathered her little flock. "She 

 loved to read, to study, and to teach," said one who 

 had known her, and "she knew how to gain the atten- 

 tion of the young, and to fix knowledge in their minds. 

 'If I can hold the mind of a child to a subject for five 

 minutes, he will never forget what I teach him,' she once 

 remarked; and, acting upon this principle, she was as 

 successful, at three score and ten years, in imparting 

 knowledge, as she had been in early life when she taught 

 in Louisiana." 



Mrs. Audubon's own house was rented and eventu- 

 ally sold. Meanwhile, it seems, she lived for a number 

 of years with the family of her eldest son, and it was at 

 Victor's house, as just noticed, that she started a small 

 school. Finally, in 1863, at the age of seventy-five, 

 bereft of children and fortune, she left the scenes of her 

 once happy home, then "Minnie's Land" no longer, and 

 for a considerable period lived with a granddaughter at 

 Washington Heights, as that section on the river, includ- 

 ing Carmansville, came to be called, and a little later 

 at Manhattanville, a short distance below; there at the 

 home of the Reverend Charles Coffin Adams, who pre- 

 pared the original draft of the Life of her husband, the 



