His pride in the library was evident, and the fondness with which he brought forth the books was the fondness of an honest enthusiast.
"Some people don't consider Longfellow a great poet, but I do," he said, as he showed a little volume of the poet's works. "Lowell is represented here, but I think, toward the end of his life, he became too much Bostonian. The best American," he said later, "is a Bostonian who has lived ten years west of the Mississippi."
He then showed us his work-box, a compact leather case containing pads of paper, pens, lead pencils, and other requirements of the writer. I did not see a type-writing machine such as we cartoonists have so often represented in our cartoons of Mr. Roosevelt in Africa. But, then, cartoonists are not always strictly accurate.
Later on he spoke of the lectures he was to deliver in Berlin, at the Sorbonne in Paris, and in Oxford the following spring. I told him how surprised I had been to hear that he had prepared these lectures during the rush of the last few weeks of his administration. He said that he probably would be regarded as a representative American in those lectures and that he wanted to do them just as well as he possibly could. He knew that there would be no time nor library references in Africa, and so he had prepared them in Washington before leaving America.
In regard to his future movements he seemed sorry that he was obliged to take the Nile trip, and that he was only doing it as a matter of business—that he had to get a white rhino, which is found only along certain parts of the Nile.
"Going back by the Nile is a long and hard trip. For the first twelve days we will not fire a shot, probably. It will mean getting started every morning at three o'clock, marching until ten, then sweating under mosquito bars during the heat of the day, with spirillum ticks, sleeping-sickness flies, and all sorts of pests to bother one; then long days on the Nile, with nothing to see but papyrus reeds on each side."
And speaking of "rhinos" suggests a little incident that the colonel told and which he considers amusing.
"One day one of the party was stalking a buffalo, when a rhino suddenly appeared some distance away and threatened to charge or do something that would alarm the buffalo and scare it away. So they told me to hurry down and shoo the rhino off while they finished their stalk and got the buffalo. So, you see, there's an occupation. That settles the question as to what shall we do with our ex-presidents. They can be used to scare rhinos away."
On hearing this story I remembered that the thick-skinned rhino is sometimes used by cartoonists as a symbol for "the trusts," and the story seemed doubly appropriate as applied to this particular ex-president.
Some member of our party then modestly advanced the suggestion that the colonel might some day be back in the White House again. He laughed and said that the kaleidoscope never repeats.