s--yet in almost all how
dissimilar our lives! Since last we parted, 'we scarcely heard
of half a mile from home'--he tanned by the suns and beaten by
the storms of many latitudes--we like a ship laid up in
ordinary, or anchored close in shore within the same sheltering
bay--with sails unfurled and flags flying but for sake of show
on some holyday--he like a ship that every morning had been
dashing through a new world of waves--often close-reefed or
under bare poles--but oftener affronting the heavens with a
whiter and swifter cloud than any hoisted by the combined
fleets in the sky. And now, with canvas unrent, and masts
unsprung, returned to the very buoy she left. Somewhat faded,
indeed, in her apparelling--but her hull sound as ever--not a
speck of dry rot in her timbers--her keel unscathed by
rock--her cut-water yet sharp as new-whetted scythe ere the
mower renews his toil--her figure-head, that had so often
looked out for squalls, now 'patient as the brooding dove'--and
her bowsprit--but let us man the main-brace; nor is there purer
spirit--my trusty frere--in the Old World or the New.

"It was quite a Noctes. Audubon told us--by snatches--all his
travels, history, with many an anecdote interspersed of the
dwellers among the woods--bird, beast, and man.

"All this and more he told us, with a cheerful voice and
animated eyes, while the dusky hours were noiselessly wheeling
the chariot of Night along the star-losing sky; and we too had
something to tell him of our own home-loving obscurity, not
ungladdened by studies sweet in the Forest--till Dawn yoked her
dappled coursers for one single slow stage--and then jocund
Morn leaping up on the box, took the ribbons in her rosy
fingers, and, after a dram of dew, blew her bugle, and drove
like blazes right on towards the gates of Day."

"His great work," says Wilson, elsewhere, "was indeed a
perilous undertaking for a stranger in Britain, without the
patronage of powerful friends, and with no very great means of
his own--all of which he embarked in the enterprise dearest to
is heart. Had it failed, Audubon would have been a ruined
man--and that fear must have sometimes dismally disturbed him,
for he is not alone in life, and is a man of strong family
affections. But happily those ne