If ever I was in want of assistance it is at this moment and _you_ my dear Victor must be on the alert and second my endeavors to render you all Happy! I would be delighted to have a few lines from Mamma and Eliza at the end of your next letter, which I hope to receive in immediate answer to this, _Here_. I have marked all your items in your last letter. Call from time to time at the Mercantile Library. I am glad you have remitted to the Rathbone's. Do write to Mr. Hoppenstall and see the daughter of Capt. Brittan. I was invited last evening to a great ball, and should have gone had not my accident of shin bones prevented me. I am told that I would have had some 20 names there. Recollect that our agents name is Gideon B. Smith and a most worthy man he is, highly recommended by Robert Gilmor and others. [No signature] To the gratification of Audubon and his friends, the octavo edition of his _Birds of America_ was an immediate and great success. Only 300 copies of the plates of the first number, which was ready on December 3, 1839, were printed, but in little more than a month 300 more were demanded, and the number of plates required rose steadily until January 9, 1841, when it stood at 1,475 copies.[177] The total number of subscribers given in Audubon's published lists was 1,198, of which 198 are credited to Boston, 164 to Baltimore, 141 to New York, sixty-five to Philadelphia, and forty-three to foreign countries, ten of which went to England; Mr. George Oates of Charleston subscribed for seven copies. Such a reception for an expensive work on natural history was unprecedented in the United States, and has had few parallels in any country. At the very beginning of this new undertaking, the hand of disease and bereavement rested heavily on the Audubon and Bachman families; they were obliged to see first one and then another of their daughters swept by the same terrible malady, tuberculosis, to an early grave. Mrs. John Woodhouse Audubon died at her old home in Charleston, whither she had gone for the benefit of her health in the previous winter, on September 23, 1840, at the age of twenty-three; and Mrs. Victor Audubon, after a long sojourn in Cuba, and shortly after returning to her home in New York, died there on May 25, 1841, at the age of twenty-two. Audubon was very fond of his daughters-in-law, and his "beloved Rosy," as Victor's wife was familiarly called, is said to have been a particular favorite and the life of his family circle. If work at this time brought no pleasure, it at least afforded him relief from painful thoughts.