Palimpsest

"Soon after we moved here, I took off the dirty old wall paper from the kitchen--several layers of it--and found, underneath, pictures of all sorts of birds. Some of the birds I recognized and some I had never seen. They were right pretty.

"About two years ago I got tired of them and so I got a can of good lead paint . . . and put a nice coat of paint all over the walls.

"A little later I got tired of the paint and put on green wall paper. Those birds have flown away for good, I guess."

Thus James McGrath, railroad worker, occupant of rooms in a house on the upper end of Manhattan, Island. Experts in the restoration of paintings ruefully agreed that "those birds have flown away for good." Ruefully, because the house where James McGrath lived used to be known as "Minniesland" and the land around it as Audubon Park. In "Minniesland" lived John James Audubon (1780-1851), famed wanderer of the trackless American wilderness, hirsute ornithologist and painter extraordinary of wild life. Beyond a doubt the palimpsest laid bare by Mr. McGrath on his kitchen walls was the work, casual or studied, of John James Audubon, who used the present McGrath part of "Minniesland" as a studio after he came to fame.

Prints of some of Audubon's bird engravings now command many thousands of dollars. Audubon murals would have been a priceless haul for a natural history or art museum; may yet be if art salvagers have sufficient ingenuity.