320 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 
plan did not appeal to his practical wife, who had many 
friends at Cincinnati, where she was assured of a good 
income through her teaching; Mrs. Audubon also felt 
that to be constantly shifting about was anything but 
favorable to the education of their children. Her re- 
luctance, however, gave way, and in December she 
joined her husband in New Orleans, but only to find 
that the city could afford them no settled means of sup- 
port. The situation of the Audubon family during the 
winter of 1821-22 became precarious in the extreme, and 
for two months Audubon gave up his habit of journal- 
izing, one reason being that he could not afford the 
paltry sum necessary to buy a blank book for this pur- 
pose. 
Compelled at last to make a new move, Audubon 
started for Natchez, on the 16th of March, 1822, paying 
for his passage on the steamer Eclat by doing a crayon 
portrait of the captain and his wife. It was while going 
up the river at this time that he opened a chest containing 
two hundred of his drawings to find them sadly dam- 
aged by the breaking of a bottle of gunpowder, but the 
loss then sustained was apparently slight in comparison 
with that which he had experienced in an earlier disaster. 
To follow his account of this earlier and better known 
incident, when leaving Henderson for Philadelphia, 
he carefully placed all of his drawings in a wooden 
box and entrusted them to the care of a friend, with in- 
junction that no harm should befall them; upon return- 
ing several months later, his treasure chest was opened, 
but only to reveal that “a pair of Norway rats had taken 
possession of the whole, and had reared a young family 
amongst the gnawed bits of paper, which but a few 
months before represented nearly a thousand inhabi- 
tants of the air.” The heat that was immediately felt 
