amily's attending our church,
and one day proposed to Mr. Bryant to go with me to see him. Seating
himself before the poet, Audubon quietly said, "You are our flower,"--a
very pretty compliment, I thought, from a man of the woods.

I happened to fall in with Mr. Audubon one day in the cars going to
Philadelphia, when he was setting out, I think, on his last great tour
across the American wilderness. He described to me his outfit, to be
assumed when he arrived at the point of departure, a suit of dressed
deerskin, his only apparel. In this he was to thread the forest and swim
the rivers; with his rifle, of course, and powder and shot; a tin case
to hold his drawing-paper and pencils, and a blanket. Meat, the produce
of the chase, was to be his only food, and the earth his bed, for two or
three months. I said, shrinking from such hardship, "I could n't stand
that."--"If you were to go with me," he replied, "I would bring you out
on the other side a new man." He broke down under it, however, rather
prematurely; for in that condition I saw him once more,--his health and
faculties shattered,--near the end of his life.

[99] But to return,--turning and returning upon one's self must be the
course of an autobiography, my health having a second time completely
failed, I determined again to go abroad; and to make the measure of
relief more complete, I determined to go for two years, and to take my
family with me. The sea was a horror to me, but beyond it lay pleasant
lands that I wanted to look upon once more, galleries of art by which
I wished to sit down and study at my leisure, and, above all, rest: I
wanted to be where no one could call on me to preach or lecture, to do
this or do that.

We sailed for Havre in October, 1841, passed the winter in Paris,
the summer following in Switzerland, the next winter in Italy, and,
returning through Germany, spent two months in England, and came home in
August, 1843.

While in Geneva I was induced for my health to make trial of the
"water-cure," and first to try what they call the "Arve bath." The
Campagne at Champel, where we were passing the summer, is washed for
half a mile by the Arve. In hot August days I walked slowly by the
river-bank, with cloak on, till a moderate perspiration was induced,
then jumped in,--and out as quick! for the river, though it had run
sixty miles from its source, seemed as cold as when it left the glacier
of the Arveiron at Chamouni. Experiencing no ill