AUDUBON’S ANEID 303 
days I was being led to the development of the talents I loved, 
and which have brought so much enjoyment to us all... . 
At Shippingport Audubon was welcomed by his 
brother-in-law, Nicholas A. Berthoud. Wasting no 
time in vain regrets, he began doing portraits in crayon, 
and with such success that he was able to rent a modest 
apartment and have his family about him again. From 
no charges for his tentative efforts the price was grad- 
ually raised until he received five dollars or more a 
head; with the spread of his fame orders filled his hands, 
and he was called long distances to take likenesses of 
the dying or even of the dead. Audubon’s facility in 
portraiture was a valuable resource, and it kept him 
from the starving line at many a pinch in later years. 
Through the influence of friends the naturalist was 
offered a position as taxidermist at a museum which had 
just been started at Cincinnati; here his family joined 
him in the winter of 1819-20, and here he remained for 
nearly a year. The published accounts of this Cincin- 
nati experience are strangely confused and have led to 
aspersions of bad faith which were, we believe, quite 
undeserved. “I was presented,” said Audubon, “to the 
president of the Cincinnati College, Dr. Drake, and 
immediately formed an engagement to stuff birds for 
the museum there, in concert with Mr. Robert Best, an 
Englishman of great talent,” adding that his salary was 
large; so industrious were they, to continue his account, 
“that in about six months we had augmented, arranged, 
and finished all that we could do,” but they found to 
their sorrow “that the members of the College museum 
were splendid promisers and very bad paymasters.” * 
1Maria R. Audubon, Audubon and his Journals (Bibl. No. 86), vol. i, 
p. 36. 
