160 
TREKKING 
[CH. VII 
way: 44 Alice's Adventures,” for instance, and Fitz¬ 
gerald—I say Fitzgerald, because reading other versions 
of Omar Khayyam always leaves me with the feeling 
that Fitzgerald is the major partner in the book we 
really like. Then there was a book I had not read, 
Dumas’s 44 Louves de Machecoul.” This was presented 
to me at Port Said by M. Jusserand, the brother of 
an old and valued friend, the French ambassador 
at Washington—the vice-president of the 44 Tennis 
Cabinet.” We had been speaking of Balzac, and I 
mentioned regretfully that I did not at heart care for 
his longer novels, excepting the 44 Chouans,” and, as 
John Hay once told me, that in the eye of all true 
Balzacians, to like the 44 Chouans ” merely aggravates 
the offence of not liking the novels which they deem 
really great. M. Jusserand thereupon asked me if I knew 
Dumas’s Vendean novel. Being a fairly good Dumas 
man, I was rather ashamed to admit that 1 did not; 
whereupon he sent it to me, and I enjoyed it to the full. 
The next day was Kermit’s red-letter day. We were 
each out until after dark. I merely got some of the 
ordinary game, taking the skins for the naturalists, the 
flesh for our following ; he killed two cheetahs, and 
a fine maned lion, finer than any previously killed. 
There were three cheetahs together. Kermit, who was 
with Tarlton, galloped the big male, and, although it 
had a mile’s start, ran into it in three miles, and shot it 
as it lay under a bush. He afterwards shot another, a 
female, wdio was lying on a stone kopje. Neither made 
any attempt to charge. The male had been eating a 
tommy. The lion w r as with a lioness, which wheeled to 
one side as the horsemen galloped after her maned mate. 
He turned to bay after a run of less than a mile, and 
started to charge from a distance of two hundred yards ; 
