208 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 
Because of the peculiar relations which existed between 
these two pioneers, we must follow the history of the 
elder man a little more closely. 
Alexander Wilson was the son of a weaver at Pais- 
ley, Scotland, where he was born in 1766; he was thus 
Audubon’s senior by nineteen years. His father, who 
was esteemed for his honesty and intelligence, had tasted 
prosperity, but irremediable poverty fell to his lot in 
later life. Alexander, the younger son, was motherless 
at ten, and the stepmother that soon appeared seems 
to have shown him scant sympathy, or, at all events, 
never won his affection. Alexander Wilson’s youth 
unhappily coincided with an era of bad feeling in his 
native land; the times were hard in bonny Scotland, 
education was stagnant, and the public morals were 
debased. Wilson was a child of his times; like thou- 
sands of other youths, he was bound to suffer from the 
conditions of his early environment, but unlike many 
thousands of his day, he was possessed of talents and 
ambition which bitter adversity tended to sharpen and 
could never repress. 
At thirteen young Wilson was taken from school and 
apprenticed to a weaver, William Duncan, his brother- 
in-law, and for three years he was no stranger to hard 
work and the birchen rod. For nearly three years more, 
as master weaver, he knew little beyond the grind and 
grime of the factory and the society of factory hands. 
At eighteen, however, his rebellious spirit struck, and 
for ten years he appeared in the réle of itinerant peddler, 
poet and orator, and as socialist to the extent of cham- 
pioning the oppressed weaver class. At one time Wil- 
son came into correspondence with Robert Burns and 
later made his acquaintance. His best dialect poem, 
“Watty and Meg, or The Taming of a Shrew,” pub- 
