94 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 
moment my eyes took in the noble contour of that Roman 
face, I felt that it was he, and could be no one else. Yee, it 
was Audubon in his wilderness garb, hale and alert, with 
sixty winters upon his shoulders, as one of his own “old 
eagles, feathered to the heel,”—fresh from where the floods 
are cradled amid crag-piled glooms, or flowery extended 
plains ! 
He looked as I had dreamed the antique Plato must have 
looked, with that fine, classic head and lofty mien! He 
fully realized the hero of the ideal. With what eager and 
affectionate admiration I gazed upon him, the valorous and 
venerable Sage! 
What a deathless and beautiful dedication his had been to 
the holy priesthood of nature! I felt that the very hem of 
his garments—of that rusty and faded green blanket, ought 
to be sacred t all devotees of science, and was so to me. 
What an indomitable flame, that not 
‘The wreakful siege of battering years” P 
could qu.ll, must fire that heroic heart. To think, that now, 
when “ Tix.e had delved its parallels upon his brow’’—when 
he had alrexdy accomplished the most Herculean labor of the 
age in his “Birds of America’’—still unsatisfied, he should 
undert.ke a new, and as grand a work, upon the animals; 
and now he was returning with the trophies of science gath- 
ered on his toilsome and dangerous journeyings ! F 
Ah, how I venerated him! How I longed to know him, 
and to be permitted to sit at his feet and learn, and hear his 
own livs discourse of those loveable themes which had so 
absorbed my life. 
I scarcely slept that night, for my brain was teeming with 
novel and happy images. I determined to stretch to the 
utmost the traveller’s license, and approach him in the morn- 
ing. My happy fortune in having been able to make the 
“surrender” in his favor, assisted me, or else his quick eye 
