Compelled at last to make a new move, Audubon started for Natchez, on the 16th of March, 1822, paying for his passage on the steamer _Eclat_ by doing a crayon portrait of the captain and his wife. It was while going up the river at this time that he opened a chest containing two hundred of his drawings to find them sadly damaged by the breaking of a bottle of gunpowder, but the loss then sustained was apparently slight in comparison with that which he had experienced in an earlier disaster. To follow his account of this earlier and better known incident, when leaving Henderson for Philadelphia, he carefully placed all of his drawings in a wooden box and entrusted them to the care of a friend, with injunction that no harm should befall them; upon returning several months later, his treasure chest was opened, but only to reveal that "a pair of Norway rats had taken possession of the whole, and had reared a young family amongst the gnawed bits of paper, which but a few months before represented nearly a thousand inhabitants of the air." The heat that was immediately felt in his head, said the naturalist, was too great to be endured, and the days that followed were days of oblivion to him; but upon recuperation he took up his gun, his notebook and his pencils, "and went forth to the woods as gaily as if nothing had happened"; after a lapse of three years his portfolio was again filled, and the earlier work replaced by better. Audubon's drawings and plates were also repeatedly ravaged by fires, but this was at a much later day. While Audubon was engaged in teaching French, music, or drawing, now to private pupils at Natchez, now in a school at Washington, Mississippi, nine miles away, the summer of 1822 passed with the outlook as ominous as ever. On August 23 he wrote: "My friend, Joseph Mason, left me today, and we experienced great pain at parting. I gave him paper and chalks to work his way with, and the double barrelled-gun ... which I had purchased in Philadelphia in 1805." Mason, who, for a year and nine months, was Audubon's aid and constant companion, seems to have settled eventually as an artist in Philadelphia, where we hear of him in 1824 and again in 1827.[293]