A MEETING OF RIVALS 219 
250 subscribers; it was then that his publishers decided 
to extend the original edition of his work to 500 copies. 
His longer and more perilous journey of 1810, when his 
meeting with Audubon occurred, has already been de- 
scribed. In 1812, after the sixth volume of the Orni- 
thology had appeared, he again resumed his travels in 
the East and went as far north as Burlington, on Lake 
Champlain; at Haverhill, New Hampshire, he was sum- 
marily arrested and thrown into jail, the people of the 
town, utterly unable to comprehend the nature of his 
pursuits, suspecting that in his real capacity he was act- 
ing as a spy in the employ of the Canadian Government. 
The seventh and last volume of the Ornithology which 
Wilson lived to complete made its appearance in the 
spring of 1813. He had then been obliged to relinquish 
his work on the Cyclopedia, and was reduced to the pit- 
tance derived from the coloring of his own plates. 
Alexander Wilson died at Philadelphia, after a brief 
illness, on August 23, 1813. A story was current that 
his end was saddened, if not hastened, by the dishonesty 
of his publishers, but I cannot vouch for it. Audubon 
may have had this report in mind when he wrote his 
name in the hotel register at Niagara Falls ** on August 
24, 1824; and added that he would never die, like Wilson, 
“under the lash of a bookseller.” Even as late as 1879 
Miss Malvina Lawson, daughter of Wilson’s friend and 
engraver, left no doubt as to her belief when she wrote: 
“and to his other trials was added the fact that killed 
him,—the dishonesty of his publisher.””” 
When we consider that Wilson’s entire working pe- 
riod on the Ornithology was not over ten years, and that 
“See Vol. I, p. 340. 
2 See a letter to Professor S. S. Haldeman, dated February 6, 1879, 
in Penn Monthly, vol. x (Philadelphia, 1879). 
