THE “ PIGSKIN LIBRARY ” 
523 
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 conse¬ 
quence the books were stained with blood, sweat, gun-oil, dust, 
and ashes ; ordinary bindings either vanished or became loath¬ 
some, 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 44 Memoirs of Marbot,” JEschylus, Sophocles, 
Aristotle, Joinville’s 44 History of St. Louis,’* the Odyssey (Pal¬ 
mer’s translation), volumes of Gibbon and Parkman, Lounsbury’s 
Chaucer, Theocritus, Lea’s 44 History of the Inquisition,” Lord 
Acton’s Essays, and Ridgeway’s 44 Prehistoric Greece.” Once I 
took Ferrero’s 44 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 44 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 44 History of 
the Greek Epic.” 1 Having become interested in Mahaffy’s Essays 
on Hellenistic Greece, I took Polybius on my next trip ; having 
just read Benjamin Ide Wheeler’s 44 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 transla¬ 
tions from early Irish poetry. Yet another time I took Morris’s 
translations of various Norse Sagas, including the Heimskringla, 
and liked them so much that I then incautiously took his transla¬ 
tion of Beowulf, only to find that while it had undoubtedly been 
translated out of Anglo-Saxon, it had not been translated into 
English, but merely into a language bearing a specious resemblance 
thereto. Once I took Sutherland’s 44 History of the Growth of the 
Moral Instinct but I did not often take scientific books, simply 
because as yet scientific books rarely have literary value. Of 
course a really good scientific book should be as interesting to 
1 I am writing on the White Nile from memory. The titles I give may some¬ 
times be inaccurate, and I cannot, of course, begin to remember all the books I have 
at different times taken out with me. 
