As we have said before, one great merit of these books is that they are interesting. Quite a number of men who are good sportsmen, as well as men of means, have written books about their experiences in Africa; but the trouble with too many of these short and simple annals of the rich is, that they are very dull. They are not literature, any more than treatises on farriery and cooking are literature. To read a mere itinerary is like reading a guide-book. No great enthusiasm in the reader can be roused by such a statement as “this day walked twenty-three miles, shot one giraffe and two zebras; porter deserted with the load containing the spare boots”; and the most exciting events, if chronicled simply as “shot three rhinos and two buffalo; the first rhino and both buffalo charged,” become about as thrilling as a paragraph in Baedeker. There is no need of additional literature of the guide-book and cookery-book kind. “Fine writing” is, of course, abhorrent in a way that is not possible for mere baldness of statement, and would-be “funny” writing is even worse, as it almost invariably denotes an underbred quality of mind; but there is need of a certain amount of detail, and of vivid and graphic, though simple, description. In other words, the writer on big game should avoid equally Carlyle’s theory and Carlyle’s practice in the matter of verbosity. Really good game books are sure to contain descriptions which linger in the mind just like one’s pet passages in any other good book. One example is Selous’ account of his night watch close to the wagon, when in the pitchy darkness he killed three of the five lions which had attacked his oxen; or his extraordinary experience while hunting elephants on a stallion which turned sulky, and declined to gallop out of danger. The same is true of Drummond’s descriptions of the camps of native hunting parties, of tracking wounded buffalo through the reeds, and of waiting for rhinos by a desert pool under the brilliancy of the South African moon; descriptions, by the way, which show that the power of writing interestingly is not dependent upon even approximate correctness in style, for some of Mr. Drummond’s sentences, in point of length and involution, would compare not unfavorably with those of a Populist Senator discussing bimetallism. Drummond is not as trustworthy an observer as Selous.