At that time I was about fourteen years old. I was beginning the study of taxidermy, and was naturally deeply interested in birds. I happened to be at the refinery watching the process of loading one of the furnaces, and noticed on one of the sheets of copper that a man was throwing into the furnace, what appeared to me to be the picture of a bird's foot. I took the plate from him, cleaned it with acid, and thereupon discovered the engraving, or as I termed it, the picture, of a bird (Plate cvi, Black Vulture), I made an immediate but unsuccessful request to the foreman of the furnace not to melt the plates; and then I appealed to the superintendent, but without avail. I next brought the matter to the general manager of the concern, my father, from whom I received no encouragement. This sort of treatment was evidently what I needed, for I hastened back to the works in a state of mind so determined that I succeeded in having all the plates, that had not been melted, removed to a place of safety. This occurred in the spring of that year; and the plates remained undisturbed until the annual inventory was taken the first of the following year. At that time the disposition of the plates was taken up. I appealed to my mother and interested her to such an extent that she drove to the factory and looked at one of the plates. She of course recognized that they were Audubon plates; and instructions were given by my father to keep them intact. The plates were subsequently submitted to a treatment which removed all oxidation and then taken to the main office of the company, and to the best of my recollection, distributed as follows: Mr. Wm. E. Dodge, president of the company, had a few plates sent to the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, and a few plates to the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C., and I think he retained one or two for himself. The remainder of them, with the exception of two, my father kept; and they have since come into my possession by purchase from the estate. The two plates just excepted were Nos. xxii and lxxxii [Purple Martin and Whippoorwill], and they particularly struck my fancy, so much that when the plates were first discovered I managed to secure them on the quiet, cleaned them myself and hid them; and when the plates were distributed no one knew of the existence of these two and they later became my property.