106 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 
Young Audubon lived at “Mill Grove” from the win- 
ter of 1804 to the spring of 1805, and again for a few 
months in the summer of 1806, the year of its final sale 
by the Audubons and Roziers (see p. 148). In his 
journal of 1820 the naturalist wrote that his father had 
once the honor of being presented to General Washing- 
ton, and also to Major Crogan, of Kentucky, “who was 
particularly well acquainted with him.” Jean Audubon 
left at “Mill Grove” oil portraits of himself and of 
Washington, both by an inferior American artist named 
Polk,’® and it is probable that the one of himself was 
painted while he was at Philadelphia in the spring of 
1789; the drawing is hard and flat, but the appearance 
of the face clearly indicates a man past middle life, and 
Captain Audubon had then reached his forty-fifth year. 
Young Audubon, we may be sure, lost no time in 
exploring the resources of this fine estate, where every 
bird, tree and flower came to him as a new discovery. 
In following the Perkioming above the mill dam he 
found a cave, carved out of the rocks, as he thought, by 
nature’s own hand, which was a favorite haunt of the 
unpretentious but friendly pewees, the first American 
birds to attract his serious attention. So delighted was 
the youthful naturalist that he decided to make the pe- 
wees’ cave his study; thither accordingly he brought his 
books, pencils and paper, and there made his first studies 
of American bird life, in the spring of 1804, in the third 
at Nantes, agreed to keep the house in good repair from that time onward. 
It was the Prevost mortgage that Miers Fisher paid but forgot to cancel 
(see Vol. I, p. 122); it was finally cleared up by Dacosta in October, 1806. 
Miers Fisher’s Philadelphia residence, called “Ury,” which Audubon 
often visited, was near Fox Chase, now in the Twenty-third Ward. See 
Witmer Stone, Cassinia, No. xvii (Philadelphia, 1913). 
2 For a photograph of this portrait of Lieutenant Audubon here repro- 
duced, I am indebted to Miss Maria R. Audubon; the originals of both 
portraits are now in possession of Auduhon’s granddaughter, Mrs. Morris 
F. Tyler. 
