him. Had there not chanced to be another air hole a few yards below, our
hero's career would have ended then and there. The current quickly carried
him beneath the ice to this other opening where he managed to seize hold of
the ice and to crawl out.

His friendship with the Bakewell family deepened. Lucy taught Audubon
English, he taught her drawing, and their friendship very naturally ripened
into love, which seems to have run its course smoothly.

Audubon was happy. He had ample means, and his time was filled with
congenial pursuits. He writes in his journal: "I had no vices, but was
thoughtless, pensive, loving, fond of shooting, fishing, and riding, and
had a passion for raising all sorts of fowls, which sources of interest and
amusement fully occupied my time. It was one of my fancies to be
ridiculously fond of dress; to hunt in black satin breeches, wear pumps
when shooting, and to dress in the finest ruffled shirts I could obtain
from France."

The evidences of vanity regarding his looks and apparel, sometimes found in
his journal, are probably traceable to his foster-mother's unwise treatment
of him in his youth. We have seen how his father's intervention in the nick
of time exercised a salutary influence upon him at this point in his
career, directing his attention to the more solid attainments. Whatever
traces of this self-consciousness and apparent vanity remained in after
life, seem to have been more the result of a naive character delighting in
picturesqueness in himself as well as in Nature, than they were of real
vanity.

In later years he was assuredly nothing of the dandy; he himself ridicules
his youthful fondness for dress, while those who visited him during his