168 THE CONDOR Aa Vol. XXI 
nithologist by his skill with the pencil. He showed me a good many drawings 
of birds made in his early days, and I particularly remember a spirited pencil 
sketch of Audubon which hung on the wall of the parlor. This, he said, Audu- 
bon, years before, pronounced the best likeness of himself extant, and, taking 
a pencil in hand, made a few strokes which he thought improved it. This sketch 
was made in 1842, and was reproduced in volume II, p. 84, of ‘‘Audubon and 
his Journals’’, which appeared in 1897. I find it referred to also in Herrick’s 
‘‘Audubon the Naturalist’’, vol. Il, being no. 16 on the author’s list of ‘‘au- 
thentie likenesses’’. e 
When I met Mr. Sprague he was making drawings of plants for Doctor 
Asa Gray to illustrate his ‘‘Manual’’ and other botanical works. Gray, who 
highly valued his work, pronounced him the foremost of living botanical art- 
ists. Though Mr. Sprague had long ceased the active study of birds, he was 
still much interested in them, and occasionally accompanied me in short tramps 
through the woods adjoining his house. He had never chanced to see a Prairie 
Warbler, and was greatly pleased when I took him to a nest I had found, when 
he heard for the first time the song of the bird. Though he had ceased to draw 
birds, he subsequently made a study of a quail for Mr. Brewster and of a ruffed 
grouse for me—perhaps the last bird studies he ever made, and excellent exam- 
ples of his accurate and painstaking methods. 
BRADFORD TORREY 
It must have been considerably later than this that Bradford Torrey took 
up his residence in Wellesley Hills, where he lived till towards the closing years 
of his life when, as is well known, he moved to California. During my annual 
visits home | frequently met Torrey, and we had some pleasant tramps together 
over the Wellesley hills. Though by no means unsociable he was not over easy 
to become acquainted with, owing to a certain diffidence and shyness which 
tended to limit the number of his close comrades. The slight barriers to his 
friendship once overcome, he was a delightful companion and a faithful friend. 
He was an indefatigable student of bird life and an accurate and painstaking 
observer, and his notebooks are full of interesting observations which, for one 
reason and another, he was unable to fix definitely upon a given species and he 
was willing to take nothing for granted. His sketches of the habits of birds 
and of outdoor life, which have endeared him to thousands of readers, are told 
in a singularly felicitous manner and with a skilled literary touch peculiarly 
his own. 
TRIP TO FLORIDA 
On October 29, 1870, I sailed for Savannah en route to Florida on a bird 
collecting trip. The peninsula was then comparatively unknown to naturalists 
and to me was a land of mystery and romance, rich in ornithological possibili- 
ties and redolent with memories of Audubon’s trip in 1831. Our party con- 
sisted of Mr. Maynard and his bride, Mr. E. L. Weeks, an artist who subse- 
quently attained to fame as a painter of oriental subjects, and myself. We 
sailed from Boston October 29, 1870, and were in such haste to reach the prom- 
ised land that we stopped in Savannah, then a quaint southern city, only a day, 
most of which was spent in a walk out to San Buenaventura Cemetery, and I 
still retain a vivid impression of its avenues of wonderful live oaks festooned 
with long streamers of grey moss (Tillandsia). 
