418 NEW FIELDS TO CONQUER. 



found the Colonel sitting on the veranda talking v/ith a newspaper 

 man. He carried less weight than he did when ne left Washing- 

 ton, but he looked as hard as nails. His skin was about the color 

 of saddle leather. 



" In the course of conversation he told us that he thought he 

 had discovered, while he was President, every type of folly the 

 American people were capable of, but he had discovered a new 

 scheme since he had been in Africa. The proprietor of every small 

 zoo in America, he said, had written asking him to send them a 

 specimen. Anything would do, they wrote, from a field mouse to 

 a tiger. 



"The richest letter he had, the Colonel added, came from a 

 society cf hunters in New York. The members wanted to give 

 him a dinner upon his return, the secretary had written, and would 

 he please pickle, preserve or otherwise keep in condition a piece of 

 meat from every sort of animal he had killed, so they could have 

 them all for the dinner ? 



" ' It looks like they wanted me to give them a dinner instead 

 of letting them give me one,' was the Colonel's concluding re- 

 mark." 



THE COLONEL SHOOTS A WHITE RHINOCEROS. 



Colonel Roosevelt shot a female white rhinoceros and a young 

 rhinoceros on the first night that the party was at Camp Rhino. 

 One of the Colonel's chief objects in going to Africa to hunt was 

 to shoot a white rhinoceros, a type which is getting very rare. 



Fortunately for the human inhabitants of the regions where 

 the white rhinoceros dwells, its temper is remarkably quiet and 

 devoid of that restless irritability and sudden access of rage which 

 is so distinguishing a quality of the two black species. Even 

 when wounded it seldom turns upon its antagonist, but contents 

 itself with endeavoring to make its escape. Some times, however, 

 probably when it has its young to protect, it will assume the oflfen- 

 sive, and is then even more to be dreaded than its black relatives. 



The following anecdote, which was related by a well known 

 African hunter, affords an instance of this rare display of com- 

 bativeness : 



