210 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 
The story is told that while they made their 
way through the woods of Delaware, Wilson 
shot a Red-headed Woodpecker and met with 
the Cardinal Grosbeak; as he often referred to the 
pleasure which the sight of these beautiful birds had 
given him, the incident, if it really occurred, may have 
played a part in the inspiration, which later came to 
Wilson, of becoming the historian of American bird 
life. 
After eight hard years of shifting about, during 
which Wilson tried day-labor, weaving, peddling and 
school teaching, working long hours at miserable pay, he 
finally settled as a country school teacher near New 
York. On the twelfth of July, 1801, he wrote to a fellow 
teacher and friend, Charles Orr, who was then living at 
Philadelphia: “I live six miles from Newark and twelve 
miles from New York, in a settlement of canting, 
preaching, przying, and snivelling ignorant Presbyte- 
rians. They pay their minister 250 pounds for preach- 
ing twice a week, and their teacher 40 dollars a quarter 
‘for the most spirit-sinking, laborious work—6, I may 
say 12 times weekly.” ‘To the same friend, in 1802, 
he confided: “My disposition is to love those who love 
me with all the warmth of enthusiasm, but to feel with 
the keenest sensibility the smallest appearance of neglect 
or contempt from those I regard.” 
In 1802, at the age of thirty-six, Wilson decided to 
take up a school at Gray’s Ferry, on the Schuylkill 
River, in Kingsessing Township, then a small settlement 
four miles from Philadelphia. A year later, in 1803, 
John James Audubon was sent to America to learn 
English and enter trade, and, as chance would have it, 
settled on the banks of the same river, not many miles 
from Wilson’s old schoolhouse. In one respect the 
