undred skins that he acquired are
now preserved in the Kent Scientific Museum of Grand Rapids.

His summer vacations while he was in college were spent cruising the Great
Lakes in a 28-foot cutter sloop. After graduating he spent six months in a
packing-house at $6 a week. His adventure in the Black Hills gold rush
followed.

It was during his studies at Columbia that White wrote, as part of his
class work, a story called "A Man and His Dog" which Brander Matthews
urged him to try to sell. Short Stories brought it for $15 and subsequent
stories sold also. One brought as much as $35!

He tried working in MCClurg's bookstore in Chicago at $9 a week. Then he
set out for Hudson Bay. _The Claim Jumpers_, finished about this time, was
brought out as a book and was well received. The turn of the tide did not
come until Munsey paid $500 for the serial right in _The Westerners_.
White was paid in five dollar bills and he says that when he stuffed the
money in his pockets he left at once for fear someone would change his
mind and want all that money back.

_The Blazed Trail_ was written in a lumber camp in the depth of a northern
winter. The only hours White could spare for writing were in the early
morning, so he would begin at 4 A. M., and write until 8 A. M., then put
on his snowshoes and go out for a day's lumbering. The story finished, he
gave it to Jack Boyd, the foreman, to read. Boyd began it after supper one
evening and when White awoke the next morning at four o'clock he found the
foreman still at it. As Boyd never even read a newspaper, White regarded
this as a triumph. This is the book that an Englishwoman, entering a book
shop where White happened to be, asked for in these words: "Have you a
copy of _Blase Tales_?"

White went out hastily in order not to overhear her cries of
disappointment.

=iv=

Mr. Saxton asked White why he went to Africa and White said:

"My answer to that is pretty general. I went because I wanted to. About
once in so often the wheels get rusty and I have to get up and do
something real or else blow up. Africa seemed to me a pretty real thing.
Before I went I read at least twenty books about it and yet I got no
mental image of what I was going to see. That fact accounts for these
books of mine. I have tried to tell in plain words what an ordinary person
would see there.

"Let me add," he went on, "that I did not go for material. I never go
anywhere for material; if I did I should not