TO LAKE NAIVASHA 
225 
lanterns and shot-guns, and each killed one of the spring- 
haas, the jumping hares, which abounded in the neigh¬ 
borhood. These big, burrowing animals, which progress 
by jumping like kangaroos, are strictly nocturnal, and their 
eyes shine in the glare of the lanterns. 
Next day I took the Fox gun, which had already on 
ducks, guinea-fowl, and francolin shown itself an excep¬ 
tionally hard-hitting and close-shooting weapon, and col¬ 
lected various water birds for the naturalists; among 
others, a couple of Egyptian geese. I also shot a white pel¬ 
ican with the Springfield rifle; there was a beautiful rosy 
flush on the breast. 
Here we again got news of the outside world. While 
on safari the only newspaper which any of us ever saw was 
the Owego Gazette, which Loring, in a fine spirit of neigh¬ 
borhood loyalty, always had sent to him in his mail. To 
the Doctor, by the way, I had become knit in a bond of 
close intellectual sympathy ever since a chance allusion 
to William Henry’s Letters to His Grandmother” had 
disclosed the fact that each of us, ever since the days of his 
youth, had preserved the bound volumes of ‘‘Our Young 
Folks,” and moreover firmly believed that there never had 
been its equal as a magazine, whether for old or young; 
even though the Plancus of our golden consulship was the 
not wholly happy Andrew Johnson, 
