Mrs. John James Audubon was very active in body and mind for a long period after her husband's death, and in 1857, when in her seventieth year, she returned in a degree to her old vocation of school teaching, which had been so successfully followed in Ohio and Louisiana when her husband was on the threshold of his extraordinary career. Her pupils now consisted of some of her numerous grandchildren and a few others drawn from the neighborhood; among the latter was the well known writer and father of the original Audubon Society, George Bird Grinnell, who pointed out to me the room in Victor Audubon's old house where his revered and venerable teacher had gathered her little flock. "She loved to read, to study, and to teach," said one who had known her, and "she knew how to gain the attention of the young, and to fix knowledge in their minds. 'If I can hold the mind of a child to a subject for five minutes, he will never forget what I teach him,' she once remarked; and, acting upon this principle, she was as successful, at three score and ten years, in imparting knowledge, as she had been in early life when she taught in Louisiana."

Mrs. Audubon's own house was rented and eventually sold. Meanwhile, it seems, she lived for a number of years with the family of her eldest son, and it was at Victor's house, as just noticed, that she started a small school. Finally, in 1863, at the age of seventy-five, bereft of children and fortune, she left the scenes of her once happy home, then "Minnie's Land" no longer, and for a considerable period lived with a granddaughter at Washington Heights, as that section on the river, including Carmansville, came to be called, and a little later at Manhattanville, a short distance below; there at the home of the Reverend Charles Coffin Adams, who prepared the original draft of the Life of her husband, the history of which has been given,[244] she passed a number of years after 1865.

In a letter written to a relative from "Washington Heights, N. Y., July 11, 1865," Mrs. Audubon spoke thus of the present, while memories, not untinged with sorrow, filled the retrospect:

We have passed through a very cold winter which tried both my Granddaughter ... and myself much. I have hoped until I almost despair that [she] would have a short Holiday so that we could go up to Hudson for a week and see you all and mingle with those who sympathize and care for us, but in a Boarding house, one seems a stranger in the world, and as I pass my days alone generally from breakfast till our dinner hour six o'clock evening when [my granddaughter] comes home from her music Pupils of whom she has now ten, and from that time I am glad when she is invited out to refresh her mind.

I seldom leave home but to go up to see my other Grand Daughter Lucy Williams, but being sixteen miles off we do not go there often....

I have heard from my Sister Gordon lately of Orleans, she has her Son at home! but they are likely to lose all their Property on account of Sister's Son having been engaged in the Confederate War. It does seem to me ... as if we were a doomed family for all of us are in pecuniary difficulty more or less. As to myself I find it hard to look back patiently upon my great ignorance of business and the want of a wise adviser who I now find could have saved me half the property I have under errour and ignorance sacrificed and have just enough left to keep us but not enjoy life by any travelling about in this beautiful World. I sat on Sunday night after Church on the Piazza, contemplating the beautiful Moon & its Creator, and I cannot yet say I wish to leave it, notwithstanding all my disappointments and mortifications. Excuse this long detail about myself. I cannot help looking back as well as to the present and future.

After Mrs. Audubon had passed her eightieth year she left New York and again made her home in the West. In 1874, when with a granddaughter at Louisville, she dictated and signed the following letter to a gentleman who had asked for an autograph of her husband:

Mrs. Audubon to William R. Dorlan

Louisville Jan. 30 1874

Mr. Wm. R. Dorlan