SCHOOL DAYS IN FRANCE 91 
_ by concrete examples and fostered, as it often is, by 
_ lofty purposes and the uplift of a high ideal. 
Audubon’s life affords a striking proof of the power 
which environment can exert in awakening dormant 
capacity, in developing talents to their full and calling 
into use every force held in reserve. When we consider 
what his life work finally became, and what he eventu- 
ally accomplished in a field for which he had no train- 
ing, except in drawing, we find it easier to wonder 
at the man than to criticize him. With a formal school- 
ing m France of the slenderest sort, in which the writ- 
ing of his own language was never completely mastered, 
at eighteen he came to America and adopted a new 
tongue, which he first heard from the Quakers. Twenty 
years more were to elapse before he had a definite plan,— 
during which his environment was mainly that of a 
trader and storekeeper in the backwoods, never remote 
from the white man’s frontier, hardly the soil one would 
seek for the development of budding talents in art, lit- 
erature or science. Failure in trade was one of the 
spurs which started Audubon on his ultimate career, 
for it led to the immediate development of the talents 
which he possessed ; the encouragement which he received 
from his wife was undoubtedly another. When he final- 
ly emerged, like a somewhat wild but well ripened fruit, 
at the age of forty, rich in experience, ready to absorb 
what from lack of earlier motives or opportunities he 
had failed to acquire, and with the determination to 
succeed, he won recognition as much through his person- 
ality and enthusiasm as by his extraordinary versatility 
and talents. 
In an early sketch of his life Audubon said that his 
father had given both him and his sister an education 
appropriate to his purse; his teachers were possessed of 
