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.
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