AUDUBON’S ANEID 321 
in his head, said the naturalist, was too great to be en- 
dured, and the days that followed were days of oblivion 
to him; but upon recuperation he took up his gun, his 
notebook and his pencils, “and went forth to the woods 
as gaily as if nothing had happened”; after a lapse of 
three years his portfolio was again filled, and the earlier 
work replaced by better. Audubon’s drawings and 
plates were also repeatedly ravaged by fires, but this 
was at a much later day. 
While Audubon was engaged in teaching French, 
music, or drawing, now to private pupils at Natchez, 
now in @ school at Washington, Mississippi, nine miles 
away, the summer of 1822 passed with the outlook as 
ominous as ever. On August 23 he wrote: “My friend, 
Joseph Mason, left me today, and we experienced great 
pain at parting. I gave him paper and chalks to work 
his way with, and the double barrelled-gun . . . which 
I had purchased in Philadelphia in 1805.” Mason, who, 
for a year and nine months, was Audubon’s aid and con- 
stant companion, seems to have settled eventually as an 
artist in Philadelphia, where we hear of him in 1824 
and again in 1827."° 
In the following December Audubon received a 
fresh impetus towards the goal of his ambition by the 
arrival at Natchez of a traveling portrait painter, named 
John Stein, who gave him his first lessons in the use 
of oils; his initial attempt was the copy of an otter from 
one of his own drawings. Audubon and Stein together 
later painted a full-length portrait of Father Antonio 
which was sent to Havana. Artists who have worked 
long in one medium are not always successful in another, 
but those who have seen some of Audubon’s later and 
better works in oil, such as his large canvas of the Wild 
19 See Audubon’s letter to Sully, Vol. II, p. 69. 
