Thus the Geologist felt a graver responsibility resting on him--placed there by one of them, more than by all of them: the words he was speaking might or might not give final direction to a whole career. He went on with his heroic narrative more glowingly, more guardedly:
"For a while he must keep on teaching in order to live: he taught all day, often after night, barely had time to swallow his meals, at the end of one term tells us he had as large a sum as fifteen dollars. Often he coloured his first drawings by candle light, drew and painted birds without knowing what they were. Drawing and painting by candle light!--but now he had within himself the risen sun of a splendid enthusiasm. That sun kindled his schoolboys. They found out what he wanted and helped. One boy brought him a large basketful of crows. Another caught a mouse in school and contributed that--the incident is worth quoting by showing that the boy preferred a mouse to a school-book.
"Take one instance of the energy with which he was now working and worked for the rest of his life: he wished to see Niagara Falls, and to lose no time while doing it he started out one autumn through the forest to walk to the Falls and back, a short trip for him of over twelve hundred miles. He reached home 'mid the deep snows of winter with no soles to his boots. What of that? On his way back he had shot two strange birds in the valley of the Hudson! For ten days--ten days, mind you!--he worked on a drawing of these and sent it with a letter to Thomas Jefferson. You may as yet have thought of Jefferson only as one of America's earliest statesmen: begin now to think of him as one of the first American naturalists. And if you wish to read a courteous letter from an American President to a young stranger, go back to Jefferson's letter to the Scotch weaver who sent him the drawing of a jaybird.
"Pass rapidly over the next few years. He has made one trip from Maine down the Atlantic Seaboard to the South. He has returned and is starting out again to cover the vast interior basin of the Mississippi Valley: he is to begin at Pittsburgh and end at New Orleans.
"Now again you see that he is coming nearer--nearer to you here.
"Look then at this bold, splendid picture of him outlined against the background of early American life. All such pictures are part of our richest heritage.