INTRODUCTION 19 
Messrs. Sampson Low, Son, & Marston, who without 
any authority turned it over to one of their hard-pressed, 
pot-boiling retainers, Robert Buchanan, poet and young 
man of genius. Buchanan boiled down the original 
manuscript, as he said, to one-fifth of its original com- 
pass, cutting out what he regarded as prolix or unnec- 
essary and connecting “the whole with some sort of a 
running narrative.” + Mrs. Audubon was unable to 
recover her property from either publishers or editor 
or to obtain any satisfaction for its unwarranted use. 
Whatever defects the Adams memoir may have pos- 
sessed, this is much to be regretted, since, as her grand- 
daughter has said, Mrs. Audubon had at her command 
many valuable documents, the originals of which have 
since been destroyed. 
Buchanan, like Audubon, had been reared in com- 
parative luxury, “the spoiled darling of a loving 
mother.” After the failure of his father in various news- 
paper enterprises about four years before this time, he 
had gone up to London with but few shillings in his 
pocket and had begun life there literally in a garret. 
The reflection that Audubon had fought a similar but 
much harder battle in that same London thirty years 
before, and won, should possibly have awakened in him 
a somewhat friendlier spirit than was then displayed. 
It must be admitted, however, that Buchanan produced 
a very readable story, although there was not a word 
in his whole book which showed any real sympathy with 
4 Buchanan said that the manuscript submitted to him was inordinately 
long and needed careful revision; he added that “while he could not fail 
to express his admiration for the affectionate spirit and intelligent sym- 
pathy with which the friendly editor discharged his task, he was bound 
to say that his literary experience was limited.” After copying a passage 
from one of Audubon’s journals, this editor had the unfortunate habit 
of drawing his pen through the original; in this way hundreds of pages of 
Audubon’s admirable “copper-plate” were irretrievably defaced. 
