THROUGH THE BRAZILIAN 

 WILDERNESS 



CHAPTER I 

 THE START 



ONE day in 1908, when my presidential term was com- 

 ing to a close, Father Zahm, a priest whom I knew, came 

 in to call on me. Father Zahm and I had been cronies 

 for some time, because we were both of us fond of Dante 

 and of history and of science I had always commended 

 to theologians his book, "Evolution and Dogma/* He 

 was an Ohio boy, and his early schooling had been ob- 

 tained in old-time American fashion in a little log school; 

 where, by the way, one of the other boys was Januarius 

 Aloysius MacGahan, afterward the famous war correspon- 

 dent and friend of Skobeloff. Father Zahm told me that 

 MacGahan even at that time added an utter fearlessness 

 to chivalric tenderness for the weak, and was the defender 

 of any small boy who was oppressed by a larger one. Later 

 Father Zahm was at Notre Dame University, in Indiana, 

 with Maurice Egan, whom, when I was President, I ap- 

 pointed minister to Denmark. 



On the occasion in question Father Zahm had just re- 

 turned from a trip across the Andes and down the Ama- 

 zon, and came in to propose that after I left the presidency 

 he and I should go up the Paraguay into the interior of 



