r 
Colonel Roosevelt at the Mission of the White Fathers. 
From a photograph by Kermit Roosevelt 
and gray parrots with red tails; and many 
colored butterflies. Once or twice we saw 
the handsome, fierce, short-tailed eagle, the 
bateleur eagle, and scared one from a reed- 
buck fawn it had killed. Among the com¬ 
mon birds there were black drongos, and 
musical bush shrikes; small black magpies 
with brown tails; whiteheaded kites and 
slate-colored sparrow-hawks; palm swifts, 
big hornbills; blue and mottled king-fish- 
ers, which never went near the water, and 
had their upper mandibles red and their 
under ones black; barbets, with swollen, 
sawtoothed bills, their plumage iridescent 
purple above and red below; bulbuls, also 
dark purple above and red below, which 
whistled and bubbled incessantly as they 
hopped among the thick bushes, behaving 
much like our own yellow-breasted chats; 
and a multitude of other birds, beautiful 
or fantastic. There were striped squirrels 
too, reminding us of the big Rocky Moun¬ 
tain chipmunk or Say’s chipmunk, but with 
smaller ears and a longer tail. 
Christmas day we passed on the march. 
There is not much use in trying to cele¬ 
brate Christmas unless there are small folks 
to hang up their stockings on Christmas 
Eve, to rush gleefully in at dawn next morn¬ 
ing to open the stockings, and after break¬ 
fast to wait in hopping expectancy until 
their elders throw open the doors of the 
i54 
room in which the big presents are ar¬ 
ranged, those for each child on a separate 
table. 
Forty miles from the coast the elephant 
grass began to disappear. The hills be¬ 
came somewhat higher, there were thorn- 
trees, and stately royal palms of great 
height, their stems swollen and bulging at 
the top, near the fronds. Parasitic ferns, 
with leaves as large as cabbage leaves, grew 
on the branches of the acacias. One kind 
of tree sent down from its branches to the 
ground roots which grew into thick trunks. 
There were wide, shallow marshes, and 
although the grass was tall it was no longer 
above a man’s head. Kermit and I usu¬ 
ally got two or three hours’ hunting each 
day. We killed singsing waterbuck, bush- 
buck, and bohor reedbuck. The reedbuck 
differed slightly from those of East Africa; 
in places they were plentiful, and they were 
not wary. We also killed several harte- 
beests; a variety of the Jackson’s harte- 
beest being more highly colored, with black 
markings. I killed a very handsome har¬ 
nessed bushbuck ram. It was rather bigger 
than a good-sized whitetail buck, its bril¬ 
liant red coat beautifully marked with rows 
of white spots, its twisted black horns sharp 
and polished. It seemed to stand about 
half way between the dark-colored bush- 
buck rams of East and South Africa and 
