APPENDIX F 571 



Now, it ought to be evident, on a mere glance at the complete list, 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," 

 yEschylus, 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 

 another time I took Morris's translations of various Norse Sagas, includ- 

 ing the Heimskringla, and liked them so much that I then incautiously 

 took his translation of Beowulf, only to find that while it had undoubtedly 

 been translated out of Anglo-Saxon, it had not been translated into Eng- 

 lish, but merely into a language bearing a specious resemblance thereto. 

 Once I took Sutherland's "History of the Growth of the Moral Instinct"; 

 but I did not often take scientific books, simply because as yet scientific 

 books rarely have literary value. Of course a really good scientific book 

 should be as interesting to read as any other good book; and the volume 

 in question was taken because it fulfilled this requirement, its eminent 

 Australian author being not only a learned but a brilliant man. 



I as emphatically object to nothing but heavy reading as I do to nothing 

 but light reading all that is indispensable being that the heavy and the 

 light reading alike shall be both interesting and wholesome. So I have 

 always carried novels with me, including, as a rule, some by living au- 

 thors, but (unless I had every confidence in the author) only if I had 

 already read the book. Among many, I remember off-hand a few such 

 as "The Virginian," "Lin McLean," "Puck of Pook's Hill," "Uncle 

 Remus," "Aaron of the Wild Woods," "Letters of a Self-made Mer- 

 chant to His Son," "Many Cargoes," "The Gentleman from Indiana," 



* 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. 



