108 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 
said, “I may not sce it finished, but my children will, and 
you may please to add my name to your list of subscribers.” 
The young people exhibited a mingled expression of joy and 
sorrow, and when I with them strove to dispel the cloud that 
seemed to hang over their father’s mind, he smiled, bade me 
be sure to see that the whole work should be punctually de- 
livered, and took his leave. The solemnity of his manner I 
could not forget for several days; I often thought that neither 
might I see the work completed, but at length I exclaimed, 
“My sons may.” And now that another volume, both of my 
Illustrations and of my Biographies is finished, my trust in 
Providence is augmented, and I cannot but hope that myself 
and my family together may be permitted to see the comple- 
tion of my labors. 
How that prayer has been answered, the facts since, with 
which the world is familiar, have shown. He obtained one 
hundred and eighty subscribers to the work at one thousand 
dollars each ; and lived not only to complete it, surrounded by 
his sons, but, as I have already mentioned, had by their aid 
commenced and even completed another great work on the 
Quadrupeds of America. 
It is not the least extraordinary characteristic of this man’s 
unexampled career, that he should, until even late in life, 
have been entirely unconscious of the powers he possessed. 
Indeed, he repeatedly asserts, that it was not until his meet- 
ing with Charles Lucien Bonaparte, on his visit to Philadel- 
phia in 1824, that he had any thought, whatever, of pub- 
lishing, or dreamed that he had been accomplishing anything 
very extraordinary. Bonaparte was astonished,—astounded, 
even, in looking over his portfolio of drawings, and exclaimed, 
in an irrepressible burst of admiration and wonder at the 
simplicity of his unconsciousness,— 
“Mr. Audubon, do you know that you are a great man,— 
a very great man !—The greatest ornithologist in the world?” 
It was this language that first filled him with the thought 
