5* AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 



I heard praise of Humphery, as a strong man, not in the 

 least afraid of either settler or native, but bound to do 

 justice to both, and, what was quite as important, sympa- 

 thizing with the settlers and knowing and understanding 

 their needs. A new country in which white pioneer settlers 

 are struggling with the iron difficulties and hardships of 

 frontier life is above all others that in which the officials 

 should be men having both knowledge and sympathy with 

 the other men over whom they are placed and for whom 

 they should work. 



My host and hostess, Sir Alfred and Lady Pease, were 

 on the best terms with all their neighbors, and their friendly 

 interest was returned; now it was the wife of a Boer farmer 

 who sent over a basket of flowers, now came a box of 

 apples from an English settler on the hills; now 7 Prinsloo 

 the Boer stopped to dinner; now the McMillans Ameri- 

 can friends, of whose farm and my stay thereon I shall 

 speak later rode over from their house on the Mua Hills, 

 with their guest, Selous, to take lunch. This, by the way, 

 was after I had shot my first lions, and I was much pleased 

 to be able to show Selous the trophies. 



My gentle-voiced hostess and her daughter had seen 

 many strange lands and strange happenings; as was nat- 

 ural with a husband and father of such adventure-loving 

 nature. They took a keen -interest, untinged by the slightest 

 nervousness, in every kind of wild creature from lions and 

 leopards down. The game was in sight from, the veranda 

 of the house almost every hour of the day. Early one morn- 

 ing, in the mist, three hartebeests came right up to the 

 wire fence, two-score yards from the house itself; and the 

 black-and-white striped zebra, and ruddy hartebeest, grazed 

 or rested through the long afternoons in plain view, on the 

 hill-sides opposite. 



It is hard for one who has not himself seen it to realize 

 the immense quantities of game to be found on the Kapiti 

 Plains and Athi Plains and the hills that bound them. 

 The common game of the plains, the animals of which I 



