Sept., 1914 HENRY W. MARSDEN 203 His letters to me breathed always the same spirit,--hope that he would get us what we wanted, sorrow that he had not been more successful, or extreme pleasure that what he had sent had proved interesting. He was our personal friend, to whom collecting was a pleasure, and who rejoiced in adding to our collection what it was impossible for him to keep himself. Born in Boston in 1856, of English parentage, his paternal grandfather a clergyman of the Church of England, he worked for many years as a skilled accountant in the firm of C. D. ttovey & Company. Having lost both wife and child while still a young man, he lived for ten years in the family of Mr. A. G. Olney, of Woolaston, Massachusetts, his most intimate friend. Already much interested in birds he became a member of the Bristol Branting Club, founded by John C. Cahoon, who?e clubhouse is at Monomoy on Cape Cod, and, after the sad death of the latter while collecting birds in'Newfoundland, was elected his successor as Secretary and Treasurer. This post he held until sickness compelled him to seek a more genial climate than that of New England. At Monomoy he and the writer became acquainted in September, 1890. There, as we tramped the mud-fiats and sand-hills together and fought mosquitoes, our mutual interest in birds from a different standpoint than that of sport drew us into a friendship that lasted till his death. Eskimo Curlew, which we obtained at that time, proved to be among the last taken in Massachusetts. At Monomoy we met again for a few days in the summers of 1892, 1894 and 1897, but by the last year Mr. Marsrich's health had begun to fail That fall tuberculosis of the lungs manifested itself, and he spent the winter in Florida in search of health. Some improvement followed, and again we spent two weeks together at Monomoy the following August. But it was all too evident that the disease was not cured, and he returned to Florida for the winter, writing me from there in February, 1899, that he had decided to spend the summer and following winter there, and then go to Colorado. "I hate awfully to give up my old associates, but I must submit to the inevitable", in this letter, was the nearest to a complaint ! ever knew him to utter. So in broken health and well on toward middle age he turned his face to the West to spend the rest of his life among strangers, his home and friends left behind, and what seemed his life-work broken. But out of this apparent failure he made success, and found his true vocation. For, that collecting birds was his real calling, the excellence of his work attests. No one can do beautiful work unless his heart is in it. To some his work may not seem the highest in ornithology, but it was the direction in which his opportunity and duty lay, and perhaps some day we shall all realize better than now that there is indeed "no great and no small to the Soul that maketh all". In the fall of 1899 he went to Colorado, spent the winter of 1900-01 in New Mexico, and on his return to Colorado the following spring began col- lecting birds for some of us in the East, which work he continued until his death. This gave him a new interest in life, and made him feel he was still of use in the world, even though he was incapacitated for a more confining em- ployment. But, after temporary improvement, his health again failed, and in the fall of 1902 he moved to California, spending the winter in Redlands. Here he felt he had found the climate for which he sought, his health improved, and, after spending the summer of 1903 again in Colorado, he went to Witch Creek, San Diego County, California, which was henceforth his home. Most of the next year he spent at Witch Creek, his health and spirits steadily im- proving in the dry, warm air which he found there.
