The kindness of friends, to whom he was ever grateful, gave him the opportunity of more serious and more remunerative study, and he became a patient and accurate zooelogical draughtsman.

Many of the birds in the earlier volumes of Gould's magnificent folios were drawn for him by Lear.

A few years back there were eagles alive in the Zooelogical Gardens in Regent's Park to which Lear could point as old familiar friends that he had drawn laboriously from claw to beak fifty years before.

He united with this kind of work the more unpleasant occupation of drawing the curiosities of disease or deformity in hospitals.

One day, as he was busily intent on the portrait of a bird in the Zooelogical Gardens, an old gentleman came and looked over his shoulder, entered into conversation, and finally said to him, "You must come and draw my birds at Knowsley." Lear did not know where Knowsley was, or what it meant; but the old gentleman was the thirteenth Earl of Derby.