Since the war, with the intermission of my trip to Africa for gorillas in 1921, I have stuck to my sculpture and taxidermy except for various lecture trips.
A man who is fortunate enough to have witnessed the beauties of the African forests and who has come to know the forest's inhabitants and their ways, is almost sure to be called upon to share his good fortune with others, and I have done a good deal of lecturing. My first lectures were to be given at Fullerton Hall in Chicago for the Field Museum shortly after my return from Africa in 1906. Fortunately, I had occasion to deliver a lecture in South Chicago a few days before my first museum lecture was scheduled. Otherwise, I probably would have dropped dead when I faced the Fullerton Hall audience. I think the thing that saved me from running then was the fact that I had a small audience behind a screen at the rear of the platform and knew that it blocked my escape.
I had tried to prepare a lecture, had realized that that was impossible, and had finally decided to show my audience the pictures and make whatever comments they brought to mind. Then, when I got on the platform without the vaguest idea of what I was going to say first, it suddenly occurred to me that I was no worse frightened than I had been one day on the banks of the Tana when I suddenly found myself, with nothing but a camera in my hand, charged by a rhinoceros. Apparently I had no escape except a thirty-foot drop into the crocodile-infested waters
