In the interview as thus far recorded, Audubon was clearly chaffing his new acquaintance, for not one of the statements attributed to him was true, if we accept the fact of his French extraction. Nolte, to be sure, writes as a somewhat vain and garrulous man, and after a lapse of forty-three years, but he professes to speak the truth and there is no reason to suppose that his narrative is pure invention. Nolte further informs us that Audubon's father-in-law, Mr. Bakewell, "formerly of Philadelphia," was "then residing and owning mills at Shippingport," which was not the case. To continue, finding that Audubon, who was bound for Kentucky, was a companionable man and devoted to art, a field which he had cultivated himself, Nolte proposed that they should travel together, and offered the naturalist a berth on one of his flatboats. He thankfully accepted the invitation, and we left Pittsburgh in very cold weather, with the Monongahela and Ohio rivers full of drifting ice, in the beginning of January, 1812. I learned nothing further of his traveling plans until we reached Limestone, a little place in the southwestern corner of the State of Ohio.[252] There we had both our horses taken ashore, and I resolved to go with him overland, at first to visit the capital, Lexington, and from there to Louisville, where he expected to find his wife and parents-in-law.... We had hardly finished our breakfast at Limestone, when Audubon, all at once, sprang to his feet, and exclaimed in French; "Now I am going to lay the foundation of my establishment." So saying, he took a small packet of address cards from his pocket, and some nails from his vest, and began to nail up one of the cards to the door of the tavern, where we were taking our meal. Later they rode on together as far as Lexington, where they appear to have parted company. The discrepancies between these accounts could hardly be greater, and they serve to illustrate the liberties which Audubon sometimes took with facts in composing his "Episodes." The travelers met, not on horseback, but at the supper table of a country inn; Nolte was then alone and had but one horse, while the greater part of the return journey was made by flatboat with Audubon as his guest; corn blades, pumpkins and trout suggest any other season than midwinter, with heavy snows on the mountains and rivers choked with ice. Audubon in this instance, as already explained, combined the incidents of two different journeys and colored the narrative to suit his fancy. There was no apparent motive to mislead the reader, and one of his readers he must have known would probably be Vincent Nolte, though he was not a subscriber to _The Birds of America_; Nolte did read the story, and was pleased with the "flattering acknowledgment of the little service" that he was able to render Audubon at that time as well as later in his career.