566 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 
covered my legs and arms with blood long before I had killed 
the giraffe. I rode as usual in the kilt, with my arms bare 
to my shoulder. It was Chapelpark of Badenoch’s old gray 
kilt, but in this chase it received a death blow which it never 
afterwards recovered. 
Now comes Harris’s story—and between them we shall get 
a pretty clear idea of the sensation of killing the first giraffe. 
He says: 
To the sportsman, the most thrilling passage in my adven- 
tures is now to be recounted. In my own breast, it awakens 
a renewal of past impressions, more lively than any written 
description can render intelligible; and far abler pens than 
mine, dipped in more glowing tints, would still fall short of 
the reality, and leave much to be supplied by the imagination. 
Three hundred gigantic elephants, browsing in majestic tran- 
quillity amidst the wild magnificence of an African landscape, 
and a wide stretching plain, darkened, far as the eye can 
reach, with a moving phalanx of gnoos and quaggas, whose 
numbers literally baffle computation, are sights but rarely to 
be witnessed; but who amongst our brother Nimrods shall 
hear of riding familiarly by the side of a troop of colossal 
giraffes, and not feel his spirit stirred within him? He that 
would behold so marvellous a sight must leave the haunts of 
man, and dive, as we did, into pathless wilds, traversed only 
by the brute creation—into wide wastes, where the grim lion 
prowls, monarch of all he surveys, and where the gaunt hyena 
and wild dog fearlessly pursue their prey. 
Many days had now elapsed since we had even seen the 
camelopard—and then only in small numbers, and under the 
most unfavorable circumstances. The blood coursed through 
my veins like quicksilver ; therefore, as on the morning of the 
19th, from the back of Breslar, my most trusty steed, with a 
firm wooded plain before me, I counted thirty-two of these 
animals, industriously stretching their peacock necks to crop 
the tiny leaves which fluttered above their heads, in a mimosa 
