ROOSEVELTS RETURN TO CIVILIZATION 
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American newspaper correspondents, a party of irrepressibles who 
had hired a steamer at Khartum and gone up the river that far to 
head off the coming travelers. 
The returned hunter, brown of skin and hard of muscle as a 
prize fighter, hailed with delight the bevy of enthusiastic Americans, 
all of them old friends of his, and was ready to talk with them on 
any subject but the one on which they especially desired to obtain his 
opinions, that of American politics. On this he resolutely shut his 
lips. If he had opinions they must wait. In fact he did the most 
of the questioning himself, and eagerly listened to their detail of 
American events, of which he had heard so little for months. They 
found him and his son in perfect health, an immunity not shared by 
the other members of the party, all of whom showed the effect of 
recent slight attacks of African fever. The perfect health which 
Roosevelt had maintained during his whole career in Africa was, in 
fact, astonishing and utterly set at naught the dismal predictions of 
disaster which had been so freely dealt in. 
There was something picturesque to the visitors about the little 
Nile steamer, with its huge revolving stern-wheel, that bore the party 
of bronzed hunters, dragging behind it a barge filled with rare spe¬ 
cimens of the fauna of the African wilds. Eleven of the natives, 
wearing the remnants of civilized costume, one with the lobes of his 
ears cut in twain, added to the attractions of the scene, among them 
two gun-bearers, with teeth filed to a point. 
Thirty thousand specimens, many extremely rare, had been 
obtained. They made a remarkable collection, including lions, white 
and black rhinoceroses, elephants, hippopotami, hyenas and digdig. 
The latter is an antelope smaller than a jack rabbit. The collection 
was regarded not only by the party, but by Africans, as remarkable. 
Nothing like it exists in any museum in the world, and it promises 
to place in the first rank the zoological collection of the Smithsonian 
Institution and the American Museum of Natural History. 
The work of obtaining this collection had been attended with 
much hardship and had its spice of personal danger. Roosevelt told 
the correspondents of one such instance in which he shot a bull 
elephant without noticing that another was near by. The latter 
