At Gray's Ferry, however, Wilson soon found in the estimable William Bartram, then in his sixty-first year, the sympathetic adviser, kind teacher, and judicious friend that he most needed, for though Wilson took the initiative in his ornithological plans, it was the kindly Bartram who eventually extended a helping hand. Both Bartram and Lawson, the engraver, urged him to devote his leisure to drawing, as a foil to his melancholic tendencies. Wilson did not hesitate long, for on June 1, 1803, he confided to a friend in Scotland that he had begun to make a "collection of our finest birds." Early in 1804 his purpose was clearly fixed, and on March 12 of that year he wrote to Alexander Lawson: "I am most earnestly bent on pursuing my plan of making a collection of all the birds in this part of North America.... I have been so long accustomed to the building of airy castles and brain windmills, that it has become one of my earthly comforts, a sort of rough bone, that amuses me when sated with the dull drudgery of life." A little later in the same month we find him appealing to Bartram for exact names, when he writes: I send for your amusement a few attempts at some of our indigenous birds, hoping that your good nature will excuse their deficiencies, while you point them out to me.... They were chiefly coloured by candle-light. I have now got my collection of native birds considerably enlarged, and shall endeavor, if possible, to obtain all the smaller ones this summer. Be pleased to mark on the drawings, with a pencil, the names of each bird, as, except three or four, I do not know them. [Illustration: Alex Wilson AFTER AN ENGRAVING BY W H. LIZARS, FROM A PAINTING BY JAMES CRAW.] [Illustration: Will. Bartram REPRODUCED FROM "CASSINIA" FOR 1906.] Wilson, practically self-taught in everything, with no experience or training in drawing from nature, thus began at the age of thirty-eight to make his drawings of birds, before he knew the names of his subjects, and twenty years before Audubon's talents were known to any but members of his own family and a few intimate friends. The only aid in drawing which Wilson ever received appears to have come from the hints which Lawson supplied. Nevertheless, the best of Alexander Wilson's original drawings represent a degree of excellence and honest workmanship of which he had no need to be ashamed, and in many instances he owed far less to his engraver, Alexander Lawson, than did his great rival to Robert Havell.