PREFACE 
IX 
However, for those amiable sympathisers to whom 
the descriptions of how I killed elephants can have no 
interest, my account of how one of these animals very 
nearly killed me may afford pleasure; and if that should 
be tempered by disappointment because it was not 
altogether successful, they may hope that vengeance 
may yet be consummated. Akin to the heathenish 
propensity of my early youth above alluded to, was an 
attempt I remember to have made to get out of sight of 
houses in a secluded part of a common and fancy myself 
in an uninhabited country ; and among the prophecies 
uttered at a later period by observant Kafirs, who noticed 
the development of my unquenchable thirst for prying 
further and further into remote wastes, was one to the 
effect that I should end by dying in a far wilderness, 
inhabited only by wild beasts, where no smoke could be 
seen the horizon round. 
It remains only to express my thanks to the artists 
(their names are a pledge for good work), who have 
done their part so much better than I can hope to have 
succeeded in mine, for the painstaking way in which they 
have endeavoured to carry out my ideas—actuated, as 
these have been throughout, by a desire to represent 
every incident truthfully—to Dr. Geo. Kolb, Major 
Eric Smith, Mr. J. R. W. Pigott, and other friends for 
photographs much better than any of my own, and to 
Mr. Rowland Ward for his courteous co-operation. I 
am also indebted to Miss E. M. Bowdler Sharpe for 
arranging and describing my butterflies. Several articles 
of mine which appeared in the Field are incorporated 
in some of the earlier chapters. 
b 
