EARLY DRAWINGS 179 
and a Green Woodpecker, the latter especially, which 
bore the number “96,” showing evidence of care and 
skill. The year passed at “Mill Grove” was not par- 
ticularly fruitful, but during the Couéron visit which 
followed in 1805 and 1806, Audubon said that he made 
drawings of “about two hundred species of birds,” all 
of which he brought to America and gave to his Lucy. 
After finally reaching this country in the latter year, 
these studies were continued, with an alacrity that sel- 
dom failed, until 1822, when he began to revise much 
of his earlier work, substituting water colors more com- 
pletely for pastels, pencil and crayon point. 
In writing to Bachman in 1836, Audubon thus 
referred to the work of his apprenticeship: ‘Some of 
my early drawings of European birds are still in our 
possession, but many have been given away, and the 
greatest number were destroyed, not by the rats that 
gnawed my collection of the ‘Birds of America,’ but 
by the great fire.’* When the naturalist was in Phila- 
delphia in 1824, in search of a publisher and sadly in 
need of funds, he made the acquaintance of Edward 
Harris,? who looked at the drawings he had for sale 
and said at once that he would take them all and at 
Audubon’s own prices. Upon his leaving that city, this 
generous friend, we are told, pressed a $100 bill in his 
hand, saying: “Mr. Audubon, accept this from me; 
men like you ought not to want for money.” “I could 
only express my gratitude,’ continues the naturalist, 
“by insisting on his receiving the drawings of all my 
French birds.” The worthy Harris cherished this large 
series of Audubon’s early studies and added to it many 
specimens of his later work. The entire collection re- 
7 Referring to the fire of 1835, in New York. _ 
®See Chapter XXI. 
