DEBUT AS A NATURALIST 345 
beset by claimants for payment upon articles ordered 
for the Western Museum five years before. Finding it 
difficult at this time to replenish an empty purse, Audu- 
bon felt that he must borrow fifteen dollars, but could 
not make up his mind how to ask the favor until he had 
several times walked past the house where he had once 
been known. Nevertheless, he succeeded in obtaining 
the necessary funds, took passage on a boat bound for 
Louisville, and slept cheerfully that night on a pile of 
shavings which he managed to scrape together on deck. 
“The spirit of contentment which I now feel,” he wrote, 
“is strange; it borders on the sublime; and, enthusiastic 
or lunatic, as some of my relatives will have me, I am 
glad to possess such a spirit’; later he added: “I dis- 
cover that my friends think only of my apparel, and 
those upon whom I have conferred acts of kindness 
prefer to remind me of my errors.” 
Louisville was reached on November 20, and a num- 
ber of days were spent in visiting his eldest son, 
Victor, who was then at Shippingport."* He finally 
arrived at Bayou Sara in late November, 1824. The 
captain of his vessel, which was bound for New Or- 
leans, put him ashore at midnight, and he was left to 
grope his way to the village on the hill. St. Francis- 
ville, to his dismay, was nearly deserted, a scourge of 
yellow fever having driven most of its inhabitants to 
the pine woods. The postmaster, however, was able to 
assure him that his wife and son were well, and Mr. 
Niibling, a friendly German, whom he described as “a 
21“Shipping Port,” as the village below the rapids or falls of the 
Ohio was then called, was joined to Louisville by the Louisville and Port- 
land Canal, a channel two and one-half miles long, in 1830, two years 
after the city received its charter. The “Louisville” or “Portland” cement, 
a name now applied to the product of a considerable district, was first 
manufactured at Shipping Port, in 1829, for the construction of this 
canal. 
