194 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 



me with the feeling that Fitzgerald is the major partner in 

 the book we really like. Then there was a book I had 

 not read, Dumas's "Louves de Machecoul." This was 

 presented to me at Port Said by M. Jusserand, the brother 

 of an old and valued friend, the French ambassador at 

 Washington the vice-president of the "Tennis Cabinet." 

 We had been speaking of Balzac, and I mentioned regret- 

 fully that I did not at heart care for his longer novels ex- 

 cepting the "Chou- 

 ans"; and, as John 

 Hay once told me, 

 in the eye of all 

 true Balzacians to 

 like the "Chouans" 

 merely aggravates 

 the offence of not 



1 opi (shot by Kermit) 

 From a photograph by Kermit Roosevelt liking the nOVClS 



which they deem 



really great. M. Jusserand thereupon asked me if I knew 

 Dumas's Vendean novel; being a fairly good Dumas man, 

 I was rather ashamed to admit that I did not; whereupon 

 he sent it to me, and I enjoyed it to the full. 



The next day was Kermit's red-letter day. We were 

 each out until after dark; I merely got some of the ordinary 

 game, taking the skins for the naturalists, the flesh for our 

 following; he killed two cheetahs, and a fine maned lion, 

 finer than any previously killed. There were three chee- 

 tahs together. Kermit, who was with Tarlton, galloped 

 the big male, and, although it had a mile's start, ran into it 

 in three miles, and shot it as it lay under a bush. He 

 afterward shot another, a female, who was lying on a 

 stone koppie. Neither made any attempt to charge; the 

 male had been eating a tommy. The lion was with a 

 lioness, which wheeled to one side as the horsemen gal- 

 loped after her maned mate. He turned to bay after a run 

 of less than a mile, and started to charge from a distance 

 of two hundred yards; but Kermit's first bullets mortally 



