nt to the British museum,
put on a card with a pin through it, and lived over two years in this
condition. It is assumed, however, that it sustained fatal injuries,
because after a two years' fight against its wound it finally succumbed.

We were told to avoid old camping grounds while on _safari_, because
these spots were usually much infested with ticks waiting for new
camping parties. Wild game is always covered with ticks and carries them
all over the land. As you walk through the grass in the game country the
ticks cling to your clothes and immediately seek for an opening where
they may establish closer relations with you. Some animals, like the
rhino and the eland, have tick birds that sit upon their backs and eat
the ticks. The egrets police the eland and capture all predatory ticks,
while the rhino usually has half a dozen little tick birds sitting upon
him.

However, we were starting out in a day or so, and in a few days expected
to learn a lot more about ticks than we then knew.

It is supposed to require a certain amount of nerve to go lion shooting.
It is also supposed to require an additional amount to face an angry
rhino or to attempt to get African buffalo. The last-named creature is a
vindictive, crafty beast that is feared by old African hunters more than
they fear any other animal. In consequence of these dangers we decided
that it might be well to give our nerves a thorough test before going
out with them. If they were not in good condition it would be well to
know of it before rather than after going up against a strange and
hostile lion.

That is why we went up in the balloon in Nairobi. The balloon was one of
the two Boyce balloons and had never been tried. It was small, of twelve
thousand cubic feet capacity, as compared with the seventy thousand foot
balloons that do the racing. It was also being tried at an altitude of
over five thousand feet under uncertain wind and heat conditions, and so
the element of uncertainty was aggravated. We felt that if we could go
up in a new balloon of a small size it might demonstrate whether we
should later go up a tree or stand pat against a charging menagerie.

There was a great crowd gathered on the hill where this balloon was
being inflated. Since five o'clock in the morning the gas had been
generating in the wooden tanks, and from these was being conducted by a
cloth tube to the mouth of the balloon. The natives squatted wonderingly
about in a circle, m