AUDUBON AND BOONE. 185 
delight which it gave me. Not even Herschel, when he dis- 
covered the planet which bears his name, could have expe- 
rienced more rapturous feelings. We were on a trading 
voyage, ascending the Upper Mississippi. The keen wintry 
blasts whistled around us, and the cold from which I suffered 
had, in a great degree, extinguished the deep interest which, 
at other seasons, this magnificent river has been wont to 
awake in me. I lay stretched beside our patroon. The 
safety of the cargo was forgotten, and the only thing that 
called my attention was the multitude of ducks, of different 
species, accompanied by vast flocks of swans, which from time 
to time passed us. My patroon, a Canadian, had been en- 
gaged many years in the fur trade. He was a man of much 
intelligence, and, perceiving that these birds had engaged my 
curiosity, seemed anxious to find some new object to divert 
me. An eagle flew over us. ‘How fortunate!” he ex- 
claimed ; “this is what I could have wished. Look, sir! the 
Great Eagle, and the only one I have seen since I left the 
lakes.” I was instantly on my feet, and having observed it 
attentively, concluded, as I lost it in the distance, that it was 
a species quite new to me. My patroon assured me that such 
birds were indeed rare; that they sometimes followed the 
hunters, to feed on the entrails of animals which they had 
killed, when the lakes were frozen over, but that when the 
lakes were open, they would dive in the daytime after fish, 
and snatch them up in the manner of the Fishing Hawk; 
and that they roosted generally on the shelves of the rocks, 
where they built their nests, of which he had discovered 
several by the quantity of white dung scattered below. 
Convinced that the bird was unknown to naturalists, I felt 
particularly anxious to learn its habits, and to discover in 
what particulars it differed from the rest of its genus. My 
next meeting with this bird was a few years afterwards, whilst 
engaged in collecting crayfish on one of those flats which 
border and divide Green River, in Kentucky, near its junc- 
