His bird pictures reflect his own temperament, not to say his nationality; the birds are very demonstrative, even theatrical and melodramatic at times. In some cases this is all right, in others it is all wrong. Birds differ in this respect as much as people do--some are very quiet and sedate, others pose and gesticulate like a Frenchman. It would not be easy to exaggerate, for instance, the flashings and evolutions of the redstart when it arrives in May, or the acting and posing of the catbird, or the gesticulations of the yellow breasted chat, or the nervous and emphatic character of the large-billed water thrush, or the many pretty attitudes of the great Carolina wren; but to give the same dramatic character to the demure little song sparrow, or to the slow moving cuckoo, or to the pedestrian cowbird, or to the quiet Kentucky warbler, as Audubon has done, is to convey a wrong impression of these birds. Wilson errs, if at all, in the other direction. His birds, on the other hand, reflect his cautious, undemonstrative Scotch nature. Few of them are shown in violent action like Audubon's cuckoo; their poses for the most part are easy and characteristic. His drawings do not show the mastery of the subject and the versatility that Audubon's do;--they have not the artistic excellence, but they less frequently do violence to the bird's character by exaggerated activity. The colouring in Audubon's birds is also often exaggerated. His purple finch is as brilliant as a rose, whereas at its best, this bird is a dull carmine. Either the Baltimore oriole has changed its habits of nest-building since Audubon's day, or else he was wrong in his drawing of the nest of that bird, in making the opening on the side near the top. I have never seen an oriole's nest that was not open at the top. In his drawings of a group of robins, one misses some of the most characteristic poses of that bird, while some of the attitudes that are portrayed are not common and familiar ones. But in the face of all that he accomplished, and against such odds, and taking into consideration also the changes that may have crept in through engraver and colourists, it ill becomes us to indulge in captious criticisms. Let us rather repeat Audubon's own remark on realising how far short his drawings came of representing the birds themselves: "After all, there's nothing perfect but _primitiveness_." Finding that he could not live in the city, in 1842 Audubon removed with his family to "Minnie's Land," on the banks of the Hudson, now known as Audubon Park, and included in the city limits; this became his final home. In the spring of 1843 he started on his last long journey, his trip to the Yellow-stone River, of which we have a minute account in his "Missouri River Journals"--documents that lay hidden in the back of an old secretary from 1843 to the time when they were found by his grand-daughters in 1896, and published by them in 1897.