Sept., 1914 
HENRY W. MARSDEN 
203 
His letters to me breathed always the same spirit, — hope that he would get 
us what we wanted, sorrow that he had not been more successful, or extreme 
pleasure that what he had sent had proved interesting. He was our personal 
friend, to whom collecting was a pleasure, and who rejoiced in adding to our 
collection what it was impossible for him to keep himself. 
Born in Boston in 1856, of English parentage, his paternal grandfather a 
clergyman of the Church of England, he worked for many years as a skilled 
accountant in the firm of C. D. Hovey & Company. Having lost both wife and 
child while still a young man, he lived for ten years in the family of Mr. A. G. 
Olney, of Woolaston, Massachusetts, his most intimate friend. Already much 
interested in birds he became a member of the Bristol Branting Club, founded 
by John C. Cahoon, whose clubhouse is at Monomoy on Cape Cod, and, after 
the sad death of the latter while collecting birds in Newfoundland, was elected 
his successor as Secretary and Treasurer. This post he held until sickness 
compelled him to seek a more genial climate than that of New England. At 
Monomoy he and the writer became acquainted in September, 1890. Tliere, as 
we tramped the mud-flats and sand-hills together and fought mosquitoes, 
our mutual interest in birds from a different standpoint than that of sport 
drew us into a friendship that lasted till his death. Eskimo Curlew, which we 
obtained at that time, proved to be among the last taken in Massachusetts. 
At Monomoy we met again for a few days in the summers of 1892, 1894 
and 1897, but by the last year Mr. Marsden’s health had begun to fail. That fall 
tuberculosis of the lungs manifested itself, and he spent the winter in Florida 
in search of health. Some improvement followed, and again we spent two 
weeks together at Monomoy the following August. But it was all too evident 
that the disease was not cured, and he returned to Florida for the winter, 
writing me from there in February, 1899, that he had decided to spend the 
summer and following winter there, and then go to Colorado. 
“I hate awfully to give up my old associates, but I must submit to the 
inevitable”, in this letter, was the nearest to a complaint I ever knew him to 
utter. So in broken health and well on toward middle age he turned his face 
to the West to spend the I’est of his life among strangers, his home and friends 
left behind, and what seemed his life-work broken. But out of this apparent 
failure he made success, and found his true vocation. For, that collecting 
birds was his real calling, the excellence of his work attests. No one can do 
beautiful work unless his heart is in it. To some his work may not seem the 
highest in ornithology, but it was the direction in which his opportunity and 
duty lay, and perhaps some day we shall all realize better than now that there 
is indeed “no great and no small to the Soul that maketh all”. 
In the fall of 1899 he went to Colorado, spent the winter of 1900-01 in 
New Mexico, and on his return to Colorado the following spring began col- 
lecting birds for some of us in the East, which work he continued until his 
death. This gave him a new interest in life, and made him feel he was still 
of use in the world, even though he was incapacitated for a more confining em- 
ployment. But, after temporary improvement, his health again failed, and in 
the fall of 1902 he moved to California, spending the winter in Redlands. Here 
he felt he had found the climate for which he sought, his health- improved, 
and, after spending the summer of 1903 again in Colorado, he went to Witch 
Creek, San Diego County, California, which was henceforth his home. Most 
of the next year he spent at Witch Creek, his health and spirits steadily im- 
proving in the dry, warm air which he found there. 
