APPENDIX F 
515 
(to read on the way home),, and “The Soul's Inheritance,” by George 
Cabot Lodge. Where possible I had them bound in pigskin. They 
were for use, not ornament. I almost always had some volume with 
me, either in my saddle-pocket or in the cartridge-bag which one of 
my gun-bearers carried to hold odds and ends. Often my reading 
would be done while resting under a tree at noon, perhaps beside the 
carcass of a beast I had killed, or else while waiting for camp to be pitched; 
and in either case it might be impossible to get water for washing. In 
consequence the books were stained with blood, sweat, gun oil, dust, 
and ashes; ordinary bindings either vanished or became loathsome, 
whereas pigskin merely grew to look as a well-used saddle looks. 
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,” 
.^schylus, 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 
* 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. 
