gun, and without a dollar in my pocket, walked to Louisville alone."

This he speaks of as the saddest of all his journeys--"the only time in my
life when the wild turkeys that so often crossed my path, and the thousands
of lesser birds that enlivened the woods and the prairies, all looked like
enemies, and I turned my eyes from them, as if I could have wished that
they had never existed."

But the thought of his beloved Lucy and her children soon spurred him to
action. He was a good draughtsman, he had been a pupil of David, he would
turn his talents to account.

"As we were straightened to the very utmost, I undertook to draw portraits
at the low price of five dollars per head, in black chalk. I drew a few
gratis, and succeeded so well that ere many days had elapsed I had an
abundance of work."

His fame spread, his orders increased. A settler came for him in the middle
of the night from a considerable distance to have the portrait of his
mother taken while she was on the eve of death, and a clergyman had his
child's body exhumed that the artist might restore to him the lost
features.

Money flowed in and he was soon again established with his family in a
house in Louisville. His drawings of birds still continued and, he says,
became at times almost a mania with him; he would frequently give up a
head, the profits of which would have supplied the wants of his family a
week or more, "to represent a little citizen of the feathered tribe."

In 1819 he was offered the position of taxidermist in the museum at