TO EUROPE AND SUCCESS 355 
his sister-in-law, Mrs. Alexander Gordon, urged him 
to have his hair cut and to buy a fashionable coat, but 
he could not then bear to sacrifice his ambrosial locks, 
which continued to wave over his shoulders until the 
following March. If we can accept Sir Walter Besant’s 
characterization of the period, the “long-haired Achean” 
was no stranger to the streets of London as late as 1837: 
“brave is the exhibition of flowing locks; they flow over 
the ears and over the coat-collars; you can smell the 
bear’s grease across the street; and if these amaranthine 
locks were to be raised you would see the shiny coating 
of bear’s grease upon the velvet collar below.” 
Audubon had not been in England three weeks 
before he resumed his drawing and painting habits, at 
first in order to repay his friends for their kindness, 
and later as a means of support; at times he would 
devote every spare moment to this work, and he was 
then able to paint fourteen hours at a stretch without 
fatigue. On October 2 he recorded that he had made in 
less than twenty minutes a diminutive sketch of the 
Turkey Cock from his large twenty-three hour picture. 
This was for Mrs. William Rathbone, Senior, who later 
presented it to him in the form of a handsome gold- 
mounted seal, inscribed with his favorite motto, “Amer- 
ica, my country.”* The facility which Audubon dis- 
played in producing his pictures of animal life—Amer- 
ican wild turkeys, trapped otters, fighting cats, English 
game pieces, and the like, in a style both novel and indi- 
vidual, added much to his immediate popularity in Eng- 
™This seal, the design of which has since been adapted for a book- 
plate, was long in use, and though at one time lost, is still in possession 
of the family. A copy of the large original, which was to serve as his 
first plate, was presented to the Royal Institution of Liverpool as an 
acknowledgment of its hospitality, for it had refused remuneration in any 
other form. 
