Theodore Roosevelt has been the leader and in many cases the inciter. In him then we have a statesman nowhere else now equaled; a man whose views spread far beyond our national limits and make the world their field, and before whom Europe has bowed down in admiration as before a new star that has risen in the West. ON CHAPTER XXI From New York to Mombasa N the morning of March 5, 1909, Theodore Roosevelt, as we may well judge, roused from sleep with a fervent sense of freedom and exhilaration. He had cast off the weight of political responsiblity which had laid heavily upon him for nearly eight years, and at last was free from the burdens of office and in a position to enjoy to its full a genuine holiday. That "Call of the Wild" which had rung in his ears in his younger days and led him west to the companionship of the cowboy and the perils of the hunting field, was ringing again in his ears. A born huntsman, with a native love of adventure and a strong zest for stirring and perilous scenes, the "Call of the Wild" now drew him in a different direction, to that African wilderness which is the haunt of the most savage and dangerous beasts on the face of the earth. Hunting in America is a tame and mild enjoyment compared with hunting in Africa. We have the grizzly bear, to be sure, a foe not safe to despise. But there may be found the elephants, the rhinoceros, the buffalo, the lion, creatures to be challenged on their native soil only by the most hardy and daring of men. It was not alone these lordly beasts that our huntsman had to fear. The district he sought is one where lurk deadly diseases, fevers that enervate the frame, that mysterious "sleeping sickness" from whose slumbers few awake, disorders that lie in wait for those not native to tropical climes; and earnest warnings were sent the exPresident that he was going to his doom, that in the African fevers he would find foes tenfold more deadly than the wildest beasts. So far as we know all this rather whetted Roosevelt's appetite for these new hunting fields than deterred him from them. We cannot say that he is devoid of the faculty of fear, but he has a happy faculty of concealing it. He had thrown off the harness of the Presidency, |