ROOSEVELT'S RETURN TO CIVILIZATION 435 



American newspaper correspondents, a party of irrepressibles who 

 liad hired a steamer at Khartum and gone up the river that far to 

 head off the coming travelers. 



The returned hunter, brown of skin and hard of muscle as a 

 prize fighter, hailed with delight the bevy of enthusiastic Americans, 

 all of them old friends of his, and was ready to talk with them on 

 any subject but the one on which they especially desired to obtain his 

 opinions, that of American politics. On this he resolutely shut his 

 lips. If he had opinions they must wait. In fact he did the most 

 of the questioning himself, and eagerly listened to their detail of 

 American events, of which he had heard so little for months. They 

 found him and his son in perfect health, an immunity not shared by 

 the other members of the party, all of whom showed the effect of 

 recent slight attacks of African fever. The perfect health which 

 Roosevelt had maintained during his whole career in Africa was, in 

 fact, astonishing and utterly set at naught the dism.al predictions of 

 disaster which had been so freely dealt in. 



There was something picturesque to the visitors about the little 

 Nile steamer, with its huge revolving stern-wheel, that bore the party 

 of bronzed hunters, dragging behind it a barge filled with rare spe- 

 cimens of the fauna of the African wilds. Eleven of the natives, 

 wearing the remnants of civilized costume, one with the lobes of his 

 ears cut in twain, added to the attractions of the scene, among them 

 two gun-bearers, with teeth filed to a point. 



Thirty thousand specimens, many extremely rare, had been 

 obtained. They made a remarkable collection, including lions, white 

 and black rhinoceroses, elephants, hippopotami, hyenas and digdig. 

 The latter is an antelope smaller than a jack rabbit. The collection 

 was regarded not only by the party, but by Africans, as remarkable. 

 Nothing like it exists in any museum in the world, and it promises 

 to place in the first rank the zoological collection of the Smithsonian 

 Institution and the American Museum of Natural History. 



The work of obtaining this collection had been attended with 

 much hardship and had its spice of personal danger. Roosevelt told 

 the correspondents of one such instance in which he shot a bull 

 elephant without noticing that another was near by. The latter 



