Monrovia, Liberia

July 15, 1935

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I get the stock market from WEY and Lowell Thomas from KDKA so I manage to keep up with the news fairly well; then there are programs from England, Spain, Rome, etc.

A few days ago I bought a 12-gauge Browning Automatic shotgun. Yesterday Bob and I went hunting out along the ocean in the palm groves. It rained intermittently, of course, but the pigeon flew up out of every other tree and about five o'clock we began to kick-up guinea fowl. This is a hunter's paradise with no closed season. We would walk about fifty feet in the ferns and up would go a guinea in a whirl of rapid wing beats, skimming low over the bushes to light in a more secure covering. Worst luck, we didn't knock any out of the air. I had "Buck" fever because I had never seen such hunting before. We saw fresh gazelle tracks, ground squirrels and a few other but only brought pigeons home.

I sold a little .22 today. I used it in a dugout and shot egrets and other water birds with it, but the automatic is the thing that has won my heart. Loomis tells me it will blaze away like a machine gun as soon as I get used to it.

On the fourth of July we had a picnic on the beach and in the evening the Charge d'Affairs had a ball for all of the important and "near-great" people of the Country. I am sure it was much better than a black and tan in Harlem. I had a good time because there were quite a few people in from the Du. According . . .