President Roosevelt and President-elect Taft drove up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol together, March 4, 1909, in a cold gale of wind, which had followed a sudden blizzard.  The weather was an omen of the stormy change which was coming over the friendship of these two men.  An hour or two later it was President Taft who drove back to the White House, while Mr. Roosevelt, once more a private citizen, was hurrying to his home in Oyster Bay, to get ready for his hunting trip to Africa.

This was the vacation to which he had been looking forward for years.  He had long been a friend of a number of famous hunters, and had corresponded with and received visits from some of them.  Chief among these was Mr. Frederick Selous, one of the greatest of African hunters.  Those who have read any of Rider Haggard’s fine stories of adventure (especially “King Solomon’s Mines” and “Allan Quartermain”) will be interested to know that Mr. Selous was the original of Quartermain.  Adventures like these of Selous, the opportunity to see the marvelous African country, and the chance to shoot the dangerous big game, made Roosevelt long to visit Africa.

So he headed a scientific expedition sent out by the Smithsonian Institution to collect specimens for the National Museum at Washington.  With him went his son Kermit, a student at Harvard; and three American naturalists.  They left America only two or three weeks after his term as President had ended, and they came out of the African wilderness at Khartoum about a year later.  With friends whom they met in Africa, English and American hunters, and a long train of native bearers and scouts, they visited the parts of Africa richest in game, and killed lions, leopards, hyenas, elephants, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, zebra, giraffe, buffalo, and dozens of other kinds of animals.  Mr. Roosevelt and Kermit shot about a dozen trophies for themselves; otherwise nothing was killed which was not intended as a museum specimen or for meat.  No useless butchery of animals was allowed; often at great inconvenience and even danger, animals were avoided or driven off rather than let them be killed needlessly.  Some of the finest groups of mounted animals in the country are now standing in the National Museum, as a result of this trip.

They saw many wonderful sights.  They saw a band of Nandi warriors, fierce savages, naked, and armed only with shields and long spears, attack and kill a big lion.  Kermit Roosevelt took photographs of most of the large game, coming up to close quarters in order to get his pictures.  He took two or three photographs of a herd of wild elephants in the forest, going at great risk within twenty-five yards of the herd to be sure to get a good view.