AUDUBON.



patient bread-winner of the family by teaching
music, French, drawing and other accomplish-
ments among the most aristocratic country
families.  Reared among such influences, and
with these early memories still clinging to me,
the reader-will easily understand that it gives
me a peculiar pleasure to think and write of
Audubon-and that the labor of compiling
from various fragmentary and some private
sources of information, and arranging in a more
condensed form the story of his life, has been
to me trulv a labor of love.
  The name of Audubon is of French extrac-
tion and found only among the ancestors of the
naturalist, who were humble fisher-folk, dis-
tinguished for sturdy honesty and manly
courage. His grandsire, John Audubon, was
a native of Sables d'Olonne on the coast of
La Vendee. With a laudable ambition, it
would seem, to populate the New World as
well as the Old, he reared to maturity a family
of twenty-one children. Of this extraordinary
number the father of our Audubon was the



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