Page:John James Audubon (Burroughs).djvu/42

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JOHN JAMES AUDUBON

ing the birds. About this time he began a series of drawings of the French birds, which grew to upwards of two hundred, all bad enough, he says, but yet real representations of birds, that gave him a certain pleasure. They satisfied his need of expression.

At about this time, too, though the year we do not know, his father concluded to send him to the United States, apparently to occupy a farm called Mill Grove, which the father had purchased some years before on the Schuylkill river near Philadelphia. In New York he caught the yellow fever: he was carefully nursed by two Quaker-ladies who kept a boarding house in Morristown, New Jersey.

In due time his father's agent, Miers Fisher, also a Quaker, removed him to his own villa near Philadelphia, and here Audubon seems to have remained some months. But the gay and ardent youth did not find the atmosphere of the