re frame building, close by a
clump of thirteen trees, where Alexander Hamilton had lived and where
his widow stayed on after his death.

Forgetting for a moment these old-time surroundings of the house by
the forest edge, turn to the building itself, and imagine at the
window a man sitting. He has long hair and clear blue eyes. He is
painting at a small easel and working in quite a wonderful manner, for
he is ambidextrous. He stops in his work and looks over the trees
towards the Hudson. If that ever-moving river recalls to him his past
life, John James Audubon, ornithologist, is reviewing a strange and
adventurous career in many countries, full of losses, of suffering, of
changes, of perils. He thinks of himself as a boy wandering through
the dense, hot wilds of San Domingo; as a youth hard at his art
studies in Paris under the master David; as a man at his father's
country place on the Schuylkill, failing utterly and absolutely when
he goes into business, and letting his father's fortune slip away from
his nerveless grasp. He remembers, too, his marriage, and how his wife
followed his restless career with unchanging love and remained always
a balance-wheel to his impetuosity. He recalls how, through all the
changes of that early and unsettled life, the naturalist-love born in
him when he roamed the tropical home of his youth was always strongest
in his nature, and was constantly cropping out in his mania for
collecting beautiful things that were quite worthless from a
commercial point of view, just as it was shown in his personal
appearance; for his manner of dressing, always with his hair falling
over his shoulders, marked him as a man regardless of conventionality,
a man so bound within the circle of his own thoughts that he had
little time or inclination to peek out and see which way the world was
moving.

[Illustration: Audubon's Home

156th St. and N. River]

Audubon had passed through the hardest struggles of his life, had
travelled in England, in France, in Scotland, arranging for the
publication of his bird pictures, that remarkable work which set his
memory apart; he had succeeded in his life's object, and at the close
of 1840 had come here to this forest hillside by the Hudson, built
the house on the estate Minniesland, named in honor of his wife, made
it a luxurious abode, and there gathered his friends about him.

With this home of Audubon there is associated a memory of the early
days of the teleg