Sir Samuel Tldbitc JBahci 591 



to the object ; the chances arc, therefore, in favour of 

 the rifle." 



Describing a wonderful shot he made at a flying 

 tigress eighty yards distant, he says : 



" The shot was one of those pretty accidents we 

 remember with pleasure for a lifetime. You can 

 imagine the pretty somersault she made going at full 

 speed, like a rabbit ! She never moved a muscle 

 afterwards." 



All those who knew Samuel Baker testify to his 

 truthfulness. Lord WharnclifTe, who, as the Hon. 

 Stuart Wortley, was his comrade in a great elephant- 

 shoot in Ceylon when three guns bagged fifty elephants 

 in three weeks, besides deer and buffaloes, on reading 

 the narrative of the expedition in Baker's " Rifle and 

 Hound in Ceylon," said : " I was delighted to see how 

 strictly conscientious he had been in recording the 

 incidents of our expedition." 



But Baker himself felt that there was always a risk 

 of being misunderstood and suspected of shooting with 

 the long-bow whenever he dealt with the marvellous. 

 " The fact of being able to laugh in your sleeve," he 

 writes, "at the ignorance of a reader who does not 

 credit you is but a poor compensation for being 

 considered a better shot with the long-bow than with 

 the rifle. Often have I pitied Gordon Cumming when 

 I have heard him talked of as a palpable Munchausen 

 by men who never fired a rifle or saw a wild beast 

 except in a cage ; and still these men form the greater 

 proportion of the ' readers ' of these works ! " 



Everyone knows how the early African explorers 



