THE "PIGSKIN LIBRARY' 523 



under a tree at Moon, ])erhaps beside the carcass of a beast I had 

 killed, or else while \vaitin<>; for camp to be pitched ; and in either 

 case it iiiii^ht be impossible to get water for washing. In conse- 

 quence the books were stained with blood, sweat, gun-oil, dust, 

 and ashes ; oi'dinarv bindings either vanished or became loath- 

 some, wliereas pigskin merely grew to look as a well -used saddle 

 looks. 



Now, it ought io be evident, on a mere glance at the coniplete 

 list, both that the books themselves are of une(|ual value, and also 

 that they were chosen for various reasons, and for this particular 

 trip. Some few of them I would take with me on any trip of like 

 length ; but the majority I should of course change for others — 

 as good antl no better -were I to start on another such trip. On 

 trips of various length in recent vears, I have taken, among many 

 other books, the " Memoirs of Marbot,'"' ,Es(;hylus, Sophocles, 

 Aristotle, Joinville's " History of St. Louis,'" the Odyssey (Pal- 

 mer's translation), volumes of Gibbon and Parkman, Lounsbnry's 

 Chaucer, Theocritus, Lea''s " History of the In(]uisition," Lord 

 Acton's Essays, and llidgeway's " Prehistoric Greece." Once I 

 took Ferrero's " History of llome,'" and liked it so much that I 

 got the author to come to America and stay at the White House ; 

 once De La Gorce's " History of the Second Republic and Second 

 Empire'' — an invaluable book. I did not regaid those books as 

 better or worse than those I left behind ; I took them because at 

 the moment I wished to read them. The choice would largely 

 depend u])on what I had just been reading. This time I took 

 Euripides, because I had just been reading Muii-av's " History of 

 the Greek Epic."^ Having become interested in MahaH'y's Essays 

 on Hellenistic (ireece, I took Polybius on my next trip ; having 

 just read Benjamin Ide Wheeler's " History of Alexander," I took 

 Arrian on my next hunt. Something having started me reading 

 German poetry, I once took Schiller, Koerner, and Heine to my ranch. 

 Another time I started with a collection of essays on and transla- 

 tions from early Irish poetry. Yet another tinie I took Morris's 

 translations of various Norse Sagas, including the Heimskringia, 

 and liked them so much that I then incautiously took his transla- 

 tion of Ik'owulf, only to find that while it had undoubtedly been 

 translated out of Anglo-Saxon, it had not been translated into 

 English, but merely into a language bearing a specious resemblance 

 thereto. Once I took Sutherland's " History of the Growth of the 

 Moral Instinct"; but I did not often take scientific books, simply 

 because as yet scientific books rarely have literary value. Of 

 course a really good scientific book should be as interesting to 



1 I am writing on the White Xile from memory. Tlie titles I give may some- 

 times be inaccurate, and I cannot, of course, begin to remember all the books I have 

 at ditferent times taken out with me. 



