272 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 
the case, I think few would find cause to blame him. 
When we view the whole subject in this double light, 
of a duty owed to his family and of the possibility that 
conflicting stories had come to him at an earlier day, 
any embroidery or confusion which appears in many of 
his statements of a personal nature can be better under- 
stood. Such an explanation would be quite convincing 
if payments had actually come to him from his own 
mother’s estate. 
We will only add that Mrs. Audubon, who seemed 
to have shared her husband’s intimate thoughts, ap- 
parently believed to the last in his high birth. When 
her younger son, John Woodhouse Audubon, lay at the 
point of death, in February, 1862, she was summoned 
to his bedside, but reached it too late to see him alive; 
upon entering the room Mrs. Audubon is said to have 
exclaimed: “Oh, my son, my son! to think that you 
should have died without having known the secret of 
your father’s early life!’ When asked by members of 
her family to what she then referred, she turned their 
questions aside, saying only that such remarks were 
common in moments of intense grief and excitement. 
