He cut a figure in America as a hunter. Back in 1910, when Congress amused itself with light diversions, when President Taft was in the White House and when President Roosevelt was in Africa, the eyes of the nation were turned perforce toward that great preserve of wild game. On March 24, 1910, the House of Representatives’ Committee on Agriculture went into session with the Honorable Charles F. Scott in the chair. Late March in Washington has a hint of spring, and that Thursday was probably an off-day, with nothing much to do, for the committee’s business was the consideration of H. R. 23261--a bill “to import into the United States wild and domestic animals whose habitat is similar to government reservations and lands at present unoccupied and unused.... _Provided_, that such animals will thrive and propagate and prove useful either as food or as beasts of burden, and that two hundred and fifty thousand dollars ... be appropriated for this purpose.” The bill was Representative Broussard’s, of Louisiana; he had in mind the re-population of the unyielding backwaters of his constituency with happy families of--what? Foreign sheep, or parrots, or egrets, or fish? Not at all. Families of hippopotamuses. The Gentleman from Louisiana addressed the meeting briefly, saying that he had brought to the hearing three distinguished specialists in the matter of wild beasts, Dr. Irwin of the Bureau of Plant Industry, Major Frederic Russell Burnham, a fine old pioneer whom Richard Harding Davis did describe in his “Real Soldiers of Fortune,” and “Captain Fritz Duquesne, formerly in the Boer army, who is lecturing and writing on this subject....” Dr. Irwin spoke earnestly for the introduction of the hippo, Major Burnham made an absorbing address on the habits of wild animals he had known--and a herd of camels he once pursued in Texas--and our bright and voluble Captain Fritz then told the committee extraordinary things of the home of the hippopotamus, the delicacy of its flesh, the amiability of its temperament, and the carelessness of its appetite. “During my boyhood,” he said at one stage of the proceedings, “the French soap manufacturers used to come down there and pay us all sorts of prices, competing with one another, to get the fat of the hippopotamus; and we made a considerable amount of money from saving the fat when we killed a hippo. The Boers were in the habit of going down to the river and killing a hippo and bringing it in and dividing it among the different families in the district. It is pretty hard to get rid of four and a half tons of meat. In the case of the bones of the animal, we would take an ordinary wood saw and saw them in halves, and make a great big pot of soup for a large number of the people, including the Kaffir servants on the ranch, or the farm, as we call it.” Again: “My father was instrumental in sending the camel to Australia from Africa, and also in introducing it into the Kalahari desert.