This same summer, too, I obtained various new books on mammals and birds, including the publications of Spencer Baird, for instance, and made an industrious book-study of the subject.  I did not accomplish much in outdoor study because I did not get spectacles until late in the fall, a short time before I started with the rest of the family for a second trip to Europe.  We were living at Dobbs Ferry, on the Hudson.  My gun was a breech-loading, pin-fire double-barrel, of French manufacture.  It was an excellent gun for a clumsy and often absent-minded boy.  There was no spring to open it, and if the mechanism became rusty it could be opened with a brick without serious damage.  When the cartridges stuck they could be removed in the same fashion.  If they were loaded, however, the result was not always happy, and I tattooed myself with partially unburned grains of powder more than once.

When I was fourteen years old, in the winter of ’72 and ’73, I visited Europe for the second time, and this trip formed a really useful part of my education.  We went to Egypt, journeyed up the Nile, traveled through the Holy Land and part of Syria, visited Greece and Constantinople; and then we children spent the summer in a German family in Dresden.  My first real collecting as a student of natural history was done in Egypt during this journey.  By this time I had a good working knowledge of American bird life from the superficially scientific standpoint.  I had no knowledge of the ornithology of Egypt, but I picked up in Cairo a book by an English clergyman, whose name I have now forgotten, who described a trip up the Nile, and in an appendix to his volume gave an account of his bird collection.  I wish I could remember the name of the author now, for I owe that book very much.  Without it I should have been collecting entirely in the dark, whereas with its aid I could generally find out what the birds were.  My first knowledge of Latin was obtained by learning the scientific names of the birds and mammals which I collected and classified by the aid of such books as this one.

The birds I obtained up the Nile and in Palestine represented merely the usual boy’s collection.  Some years afterward I gave them, together with the other ornithological specimens I had gathered, to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, and I think some of them also to the American Museum of Natural History in New York.  I am told that the skins are to be found yet in both places and in other public collections.  I doubt whether they have my original labels on them.  With great pride the directors of the “Roosevelt Museum,” consisting of myself and the two cousins aforesaid, had printed a set of Roosevelt Museum labels in pink ink preliminary to what was regarded as my adventurous trip to Egypt.  This bird-collecting gave what was really the chief zest to my Nile journey.  I was old enough and had read enough to enjoy the temples and the desert scenery and the general feeling of romance; but this