John James Audubon | Page 5

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 na?ve 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, knew nothing of the subjects he was supposed to teach, and was, besides, "a covetous wretch, who did all he could to ruin my father, and, indeed, swindled both of us to a large amount." Da Costa pushed his authority so far as to object to Audubon's proposed union with Lucy Bakewell, as being a marriage beneath him, and finally plotted to get the young man off to India. These things very naturally kindled Audubon's quick temper, and he demanded of his tutor and guardian money enough to take him to France to consult with his father. Da Costa gave him a letter of credit on a sort of banker-broker residing in New York. To New York he accordingly went,