"OAKLEY," JAMES PIRRIE'S PLANTATION HOUSE NEAR ST. FRANCISVILLE.
This and the above after photographs by Mr. Stanley Clisby Arthur, 1916.
Again, on the 25th of that month is this entry:
Since I left Cincinnati I have finished 62 drawings of birds and plants, 3 quadrupeds, 2 snakes, fifty portraits of all sorts, and the large one of Father Antonio,[291] besides giving many lessons, and I have made out to send money to my wife sufficient for her and my Kentucky lads, and to live in humble comfort with only my talents and industry, without one cent to begin on. I sent a draft to my wife, and began to live in New Orleans with forty-two dollars, health, and much anxiety to pursue my plan of collecting all the birds of America.
The close of the year 1821 found Audubon teaching a few pupils at New Orleans, where, he said, his style of work and the large prices he received caused him the ill will of every artist in the city. The figure which he cut in the streets, with his loose dress of nankeen and long, flowing locks, made him wish to appear like other people, and he was soon able to rejoice in a new suit of clothes. Though still in need of work, when he was asked to aid in painting a panorama of New Orleans, he refused, begrudging the time, saying that he did not wish to see any other perspective than that of the last of his drawings.
Having been from home for over a year, Audubon now wished to have his family about him again.[292] His plan did not appeal to his practical wife, who had many friends at Cincinnati, where she was assured of a good income through her teaching; Mrs. Audubon also felt that to be constantly shifting about was anything but favorable to the education of their children. Her reluctance, however, gave way, and in December she joined her husband in New Orleans, but only to find that the city could afford them no settled means of support. The situation of the Audubon family during the winter of 1821-22 became precarious in the extreme, and for two months Audubon gave up his habit of journalizing, one reason being that he could not afford the paltry sum necessary to buy a blank book for this purpose.
Compelled at last to make a new move, Audubon started for Natchez, on the 16th of March, 1822, paying for his passage on the steamer Eclat by doing a crayon portrait of the captain and his wife. It was while going up the river at this time that he opened a chest containing two hundred of his drawings to find them sadly damaged by the breaking of a bottle of gunpowder, but the loss then sustained was apparently slight in comparison with that which he had experienced in an earlier disaster. To follow his account of this earlier and better known incident, when leaving Henderson for Philadelphia, he carefully placed all of his drawings in a wooden box and entrusted them to the care of a friend, with injunction that no harm should befall them; upon returning several months later, his treasure chest was opened, but only to reveal that "a pair of Norway rats had taken possession of the whole, and had reared a young family amongst the gnawed bits of paper, which but a few months before represented nearly a thousand inhabitants of the air." The heat that was immediately felt in his head, said the naturalist, was too great to be endured, 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 a 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 constant companion, seems to have settled eventually as an artist in Philadelphia, where we hear of him in 1824 and again in 1827.[293]