THE AFRICAN EXPEDITION AND ITS OBJECTS 21 



fettering bonds of public duties and sought the haunts of animal life, 

 not so much for the pleasure of killing as for the delight of escaping 

 for a time from the trammels of civilization. 



In that critical interval when President McKinley lay between 

 life and death, his strenuous Vice-President broke away and lost 

 himself in the breezy depths of the Adirondacks, where a long hunt 

 was needed to find him when tidings came of the President's dying 

 state. In this instance, for once in his life, the hunter became the 

 hunted, and proved as hard to find as the shyest of wild creatures. At a 

 later date, when the cares of the Presidency lay heavy on his shoulders, 

 we find him again breaking away and burying himself in the cane- 

 brakes of the Mississippi in ardent pursuit of the elusive bear. 



For a hunter of this calibre, trained and ardent, a man of steady 

 nerves and deadly aim, a fearless soldier who had charged up San 

 Juan Hill through a rain of plunging bullets, we can well understand 

 the refusal to accept again the bonds of the Presidency, the schoolboy 

 delight in winning a period of freedom from work, and the gleeful 

 enthusiam with which he sought a new field of hunting adventure, the 

 one fullest of the spice of danger and promise of thrilling experience 

 of any upon the face of the earth. 



Can we justly appreciate the feelings of Theodore Roosevelt when 

 he finally set foot on African soil ; made his way inland from the sea- 

 shore to that crowded domain of wild life where roamed in freedom 

 wild animals which hitherto he had only seen behind the bars of strong 

 cages ; saw from the train as it plunged onward into the depths of the 

 land the graceful girafife, the crouching lion, the lumbering rhinoceros, 

 the various other wild animals which had learned to disregard the 

 speeding engine and its rattling cars, having found it a place of safety 

 rather than danger, since no bullets came from it to decimate the trust- 

 ing herd? 



The world of civilization lay behind him. Before him opened a 

 world of savagery. Men there were as savage as beasts, all alike 

 scions of open nature, free to give way to instinct, destitute of training 

 and education except that which adapted them to the needs of wild life. 

 Here for ages the struggle for existence had gone on in its primitive 

 phase. Now civilization, armed with new weapons and new laws, 



