Trail and Camp-Fire 



•*) ( 



published an admirable folio entitled "The Game and 

 Wild Animals of South Africa." It is perhaps of more 

 value than any other single work. J. G. Millais, in "A 

 Breath from the Veldt," has rendered a unique service, 

 not only by his charming descriptions, but by his really 

 extraordinary sketches of the South African antelopes, 

 both at rest, and in every imaginable form of motion. 

 Nearly at the other end of the continent there is an ad- 

 mirable book on lion-hunting in Somaliland, by Captain 

 C. J. Melliss. Much information about big game can be 

 taken from the books of various missionaries and ex- 

 plorers ; Livingstone and Du Chaillu doing for Africa in 

 this respect what Catlin did for North America. 



As we have said before, one great merit of these books 

 is that they are interesting. Quite a number of men who 

 are good sportsmen, as well as men of means, have writ- 

 ten books about their experiences in Africa; but the 

 trouble with too many of these short and simple annals 

 of the rich is, that they are very dull. They are not 

 literature, any more than treatises on farriery and cook- 

 ing are literature. To read a mere itinerary is like 

 reading a guide book. No great enthusiasm in the 

 reader can be roused by such a statement as " this day 

 walked twenty-three miles, shot one giraffe and two 

 zebras; porter deserted with the load containing the 

 spare boots"; and the most exciting events, if chronicled 

 simply as "shot three rhinos and two buffalo; the first 

 rhino and both buffalo charged," become about as thrill- 

 ing as a paragraph in Baedeker. There is no need of 

 additional literature of the guide-book and cookery-book 

 kind. " Fine writing " is, of course, abhorrent in a way 

 that is not possible for mere baldness of statement, and 



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