At Nashville Wilson wrote to Miss Sarah Miller, the lady to whom he was engaged but whom he did not live to marry: "Nine hundred miles distant from you sits Wilson, the hunter of birds' nests and sparrows, just preparing to enter on a wilderness of 780 miles—most of it in the territory of Indians—_alone_ but in good spirits, and expecting to have every pocket crammed with skins of new and extraordinary birds before he reach the City of New Orleans." Continuing on his course in search of new birds and subscribers, Wilson arrived at Natchez on May 18, and, passing through Louisiana, on the sixth day of June he entered New Orleans, where his spirits were immediately raised by the accession of sixty new names to his list. After six months of continuous effort, traveling now in a small boat, now on the back of a horse, but frequently on foot, drenched by torrents of rain or scorched by the unaccustomed heat, often compelled to drink the poisonous water of cane brakes in Mississippi (to which must be attributed an attack of malarial fever, which he was able with difficulty to throw off, but from which, in all probability, he never fully recovered), he returned to New York by sea, and on September 2, 1810, was again in Philadelphia. On this journey Wilson was a pioneer in much of the territory which Audubon had hardly begun to explore, but which later became the scene of his wanderings and adventures for many a year. At Louisville the two naturalists met, but they did not become good friends; though devoted to the same objects, differences in temperament might in any event have kept them apart. Unfortunately, the feelings of jealousy which were then aroused, or which were stirred up at a later day, were fostered by some of Wilson's injudicious friends to such an extent that from the moment Audubon's work became known, and long before he had published a line, they became as thorns in his path, and they continued to vex him for thirty years. It is not easy to reach a fair judgment in this matter now, and it would be impossible to do so without a better understanding of the man who suddenly appeared upon Audubon's horizon at Louisville in 1810 and then vanished. Because of the peculiar relations which existed between these two pioneers, we must follow the history of the elder man a little more closely.