John James Audubon | Page 5

moments, as she would despatch a servant for him.
Other ruddy cheeks and bright eyes made their transient appearance,
but, like spirits gay, soon vanished from my sight; and there I sat, my
gaze riveted, as it were, on the young girl before me, who, half working,
half talking, essayed to make the time pleasant to me. Oh! may God
bless her! It was she, my dear sons, who afterwards became my
beloved wife, and your mother. Mr. Bakewell soon made his
appearance, and received me with the manner and hospitality of a true
English gentleman. The other members of the family were soon
introduced to me, and Lucy was told to have luncheon produced. She
now rose from her seat a second time, and her form, to which I had paid
but partial attention, showed both grace and beauty; and my heart
followed every one of her steps. The repast over, dogs and guns were
made ready.
"Lucy, I was pleased to believe, looked upon me with some favour, and
I turned more especially to her on leaving. I felt that certain '_Je ne sais
quoi_' which intimated that, at least, she was not indifferent to me."
The winter that followed was a gay and happy one at Mill Grove;
shooting parties, skating parties, house parties with the Bakewell
family, were of frequent occurrence. It was during one of these skating
excursions upon the Perkiomen in quest of wild ducks, that Audubon

had a lucky escape from drowning. He was leading the party down the
river in the dusk of the evening, with a white handkerchief tied to a
stick, when he came suddenly upon a large air hole into which, in spite
of himself, his impetus carried him. Had there not chanced to be
another air hole a few yards below, our hero's career would have ended
then and there. The current quickly carried him beneath the ice to this
other opening where he managed to seize hold of the ice and to crawl
out.
His friendship with the Bakewell family deepened. Lucy taught
Audubon English, he taught her drawing, and their friendship very
naturally ripened into love, which seems to have run its course
smoothly.
Audubon was happy. He had ample means, and his time was filled with
congenial pursuits. He writes in his journal: "I had no vices, but was
thoughtless, pensive, loving, fond of shooting, fishing, and riding, and
had a passion for raising all sorts of fowls, which sources of interest
and amusement fully occupied my time. It was one of my fancies to be
ridiculously fond of dress; to hunt in black satin breeches, wear pumps
when shooting, and to dress in the finest ruffled shirts I could obtain
from France."
The evidences of vanity regarding his looks and apparel, sometimes
found in his journal, are probably traceable to his foster-mother's
unwise treatment of him in his youth. We have seen how his father's
intervention in the nick of time exercised a salutary influence upon him
at this point in his career, directing his attention to the more solid
attainments. Whatever traces of this self-consciousness and apparent
vanity remained in after life, seem to have been more the result of a
naïve character delighting in picturesqueness in himself as well as in
Nature, than they were of real vanity.
In later years he was assuredly nothing of the dandy; he himself
ridicules his youthful fondness for dress, while those who visited him
during his last years speak of him as particularly lacking in
self-consciousness.
Although he affected the dress of the dandies of his time, he was
temperate and abstemious. "I ate no butcher's meat, lived chiefly on
fruits, vegetables, and fish, and never drank a glass of spirits or wine
until my wedding day." "All this time I was fair and rosy, strong and

active as one of my age and sex could be, and as active and agile as a
buck."
That he was energetic and handy and by no means the mere dandy that
his extravagance in dress might seem to indicate, is evidenced from the
fact that about this time he made a journey on foot to New York and
accomplished the ninety miles in three days in mid-winter. But he was
angry, and anger is better than wine to walk on.
The cause of his wrath was this; a lead mine had been discovered upon
the farm of Mill Grove, and Audubon had applied to his father for
counsel in regard to it. In response, the elder Audubon had sent over a
man by the name of Da Costa who was to act as his son's partner and
partial guardian-- was to teach him mineralogy and mining engineering,
and to look after his finances generally. But the man, Audubon says,