APPENDIX F 515 



(to read on the way home), and "The Soul's Inheritance," by George 

 Cabot Lodge. Where possible I had them bound in pigskin. They 

 were for use, not ornament. I almost always had some volume with 

 me, either in my saddle-pocket or in the cartridge-bag which one of 

 my gun-bearers carried to hold odds and ends. Often my reading 

 would be done while resting under a tree at noon, perhaps beside the 

 carcass of a beast I had killed, or else while waiting for camp to be pitched; 

 and in either case it might be impossible to get water for washing. In 

 consequence the books were stained with blood, sweat, gun oil, dust, 

 and ashes; ordinary bindings either vanished or became loathsome, 

 whereas pigskin merely grew to look as a well-used saddle looks. 



Now, it ought to be evident, on a mere glance at the complete fist, both 

 that the books themselves are of unequal 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 and no better were I to 

 start on another such trip. On trips of various length in recent years 

 I have taken, among many other books, the "Memoirs of Marbot," 

 ^schylus, Sophocles, Aristotle, Joinville's "History of St. Louis," the 

 Odyssey (Palmer's translation), volumes of Gibbon and Parkman, Louns- 

 bury's Chaucer, Theocritus, Lea's "History of the Inquisition," Lord 

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

 Ferrero's "History of Rome," 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 regard these 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 upon what I had just been reading. This 

 time I took Euripides, because I had just been reading Murray's "History 

 of the Greek Epic." * Having become interested in Mahaffy's essays on 

 Hellenistic Greece, 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 translations from early Irish poetry; yet 



* I am writing on the White Nile from memory; the titles I give may sometimes 

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

 different times taken out with me. 



