AUDUBON AND BOONE. 129 
Fulmar and the Frigate bird. If you endeavor to approach 
these birds in their haunts, they betake themselves to flight, 
and speed to places where they are secure from your in- 
trusion. 
But the scarcer the fruit, the more prized it is; and seldom 
have I experienced greater pleasures than when on the Florida 
Keys, under a burning sun, after pushing my bark for miles 
over a soapy flat, I havé striven all day long, tormented, by 
myriads of insects, to procure a heron new to me, and have 
at length succeeded in my efforts. And then how amply are 
the labors of the naturalist compensated, when, after observ- 
ing the wildest and most distrustful birds, in their remote and 
almost inaccessible breeding places, he returns from his jour- 
neys, and relates his adventures to an interested and friendly 
audience. 
Itis thus the miraculous fidelity which characterises his whole 
work, could only have been attained. His life is full of such 
incidents. It was indeed a habit from which he never devi- 
ated throughout the long years of his faithful dedication to his 
art, to make his drawings, if possible, on the very spot where 
the specimens had been obtained, without regard to heat, or 
cold, or storm. In making his drawings of the Golden Hagle, 
his incessant application through many hours of hurried 
labor, without rest, threw hinf into a violent fit of illness 
which quite nearly cost him his life. In many other instances 
he suffered greatly. He sometimes worked, while in Labra- 
dor, until the pencil absolutely dropped from his stiffened 
fingers, trozen in that bitter air; and so it was in the South, 
his exposure to the opposite extremes were quite as great. 
But it is by contrasting his own accounts of his visit to 
Lebrador and the Florida Keys, that we will best be enabled 
to apprehend the rugged zeal of his out-door methods in these 
widely separated regions. A visit to Labrador, which is the 
nesting-ground of a vast number of our migratory birds, 
having become necessary to . continuation of his work, the 
