They also purchased a steamboat which was so much additional weight to drag them down. This was about the year 1817. From this date till 1819, Audubon's pecuniary difficulties increased daily. He had no business talent whatever; he was a poet and an artist; he cared not for money, he wanted to be alone with Nature. The forests called to him, the birds haunted his dreams. His father dying in 1818, left him a valuable estate in France, and seventeen thousand dollars, deposited with a merchant in Richmond, Virginia; but Audubon was so dilatory in proving his identity and his legal right to this cash, that the merchant finally died insolvent, and the legatee never received a cent of it. The French estate he transferred in after years to his sister Rosa. III. Finally, Audubon gave up the struggle of trying to be a business man. He says: "I parted with every particle of property I had to my creditors, keeping only the clothes I wore on that day, my original drawings, and my gun, and without a dollar in my pocket, walked to Louisville alone." This he speaks of as the saddest of all his journeys--"the only time in my life when the wild turkeys that so often crossed my path, and the thousands of lesser birds that enlivened the woods and the prairies, all looked like enemies, and I turned my eyes from them, as if I could have wished that they had never existed." But the thought of his beloved Lucy and her children soon spurred him to action. He was a good draughtsman, he had been a pupil of David, he would turn his talents to account. "As we were straightened to the very utmost, I undertook to draw portraits at the low price of five dollars per head, in black chalk. I drew a few gratis, and succeeded so well that ere many days had elapsed I had an abundance of work." His fame spread, his orders increased. A settler came for him in the middle of the night from a considerable distance to have the portrait of his mother taken while she was on the eve of death, and a clergyman had his child's body exhumed that the artist might restore to him the lost features. Money flowed in and he was soon again established with his family in a house in Louisville. His drawings of birds still continued and, he says, became at times almost a mania with him; he would frequently give up a head, the profits of which would have supplied the wants of his family a week or more, "to represent a little citizen of the feathered tribe."