He keeps a journal, and regularly notes down every thing connected with natural history. This journal is always kept in English: a language which, it must be acknowledged he writes very correctly, when it is taken into consideration that he spent nearly the first seventeen years of his life in France. Besides this, he keeps separate journals, in which he notes every thing that he learns each day on the habits of every bird. In all his travels, he carries these journals with him; and he never suffers business, fatigue, or pleasure to prevent him each evening from noting down every interesting observation. In this way, a mass of information has been accumulated from year to year. When he sits down to write the history of a bird (which is usually in the evening), he first reads over all the memoranda which he has made with regard to its habits and he is generally able to write an interesting paper on the subject in the course of an evening. At some leisure moment this is again revised and corrected: the scientific details he leaves to the last.
Early in March, 1834, Audubon left his friends in Charleston, and with his wife and son passed northward to Washington and Baltimore. From the latter city, on March 9, he wrote to Edward Harris, in part as follows:
Friends such as you have been, and are still, are the only recompense such poor individuals such as I am can enjoy in this world, and the more valued as they are so very rare.
We came from Charleston by land to Norfolk; thence to Washington City by steamer in 20 hours, and in 8 to the city here, well fatigued but safely.... At Washington, where we remained only an hour, Col. J. Abert told me something connected with the climbing of Rattlesnakes upon trees &c. that will make your mouth water, and your generous heart leap with joy, when you read [about] them, which you shall do ere long, I give you my word for it.
Audubon was still in Baltimore on March 15, for on that day he gave Harris a letter of introduction to Edward Everett. New York was reached in April, when he wrote to Bachman that they had secured berths in "that fine packet ship the North America," which was to sail on the tenth of that month.
J.G. CHILDREN
AFTER AN ENGRAVING BY W. RADDON OF A PORTRAIT BY EDDIS, 1839.