single-minded fury in battle. He had the gift of quick decision; a belief in cutting through if you couldn't satisfactorily go around; real respect for the other fellow as long as he was straight, and immeasurable contempt for him if he was crooked or a quitter; love of fair play, of hardship, of danger, of a good fight in a good cause. A level-headed winner, a loser who could grin, his glory was not that he was extraordinary, but that he was so complete an expression of the best aspirations of the average American. He was the fulfiller of our good intentions; he was the doer of the heroic things we all want to do and somehow don't quite manage to accomplish.

He knew us and we knew him. He was human, he was our kind, and, being our kind, his successes and his fame were somehow our successes and our fame likewise.

There is something magical about that. You can no more explain it than you can explain Theodore Roosevelt. And you cannot explain him any more than you can explain electricity or falling in love.

You can only tell his story, which we will now proceed to do.*

*These opening paragraphs are from The Boy's Life of Theodore Roosevelt by Hermann Hagedorn. Copyright 1919. Harper & Brothers, Publishers.

Theodore Roosevelt, twenty-sixth President of the United States, was born at 28 East 20th Street, New York City, on October 27, 1858. His father, Theodore Roosevelt, was a glass merchant, a figure in city affairs, a philanthropist widely respected and beloved; his mother, Martha Bulloch, was a woman of unusual beauty and charm, of cool good sense and passionate devotions. His father was the descendant of a long line of Dutch burghers who had been prominent in the government of their city for over two hundred years; his mother was a Southerner of Scotch blood, mingled with Irish and Huguenot-French and an infusion of German from the Rhine Palatinate. Both were aristocrats by lineage and the higher right of spiritual nobility. The Civil War, breaking upon them when Theodore the Younger was two and a half years old, turned the sympathy of one to the North; that of the other, with equal ardor, to the South; but it did not cloud the affection they held for each other or the happiness of their home.

Theodore the Younger was, from his birth, a frail boy, who suffered much from asthma and other bodily ailments. For weeks on end he was forced to keep to his bed, and the rough-and-tumble of boyhood was during his early years altogether withheld from him.

He learned to read while he was still in skirts, and before he was out of the nursery age books had become companions to him and comforters in pain. His sisters, his brother and their friends were his devoted followers, who found the stories he told them, hour after hour, altogether thrilling.

He went to school for a brief period at Professor McMullen's Academy, near Madison Square, but his health permitted him no regular schooling, and tutors and governesses gave him an uneven elementary education, which he extended and deepened by wide reading of heroic tales and natural history, of science and biography. When he was nine he was taken through Europe, but, to judge from the journal he kept, gained nothing from it except a small boy's spread-eagle homesickness for his own land. Rome, Paris, Vesuvius and the Trossachs were alike a bore to him.

Another

trip to Europe four years later opened his eyes. He had by that time become an ardent naturalist, and Egypt and the Continent were interesting for their birds, if not for their monuments. He spent a winter in a German family in Dresden and returned to America with an understanding of foreign lands which served to give him a real appreciation of his own. Still handicapped by his physical frailness, he prepared himself for college.

Meanwhile, he had acquired certain ideals of life

and conduct which exercised a deep influence on his character. He was a notable hero-worshipper, with his father as his greatest hero then as always, and behind him the company of the heroic dead, who had become familiar to him through books. He measured himself by them, found himself wanting both in courage and physical strength, and doggedly set to work to repair the defects. He took boxing lessons, and exercised with a persistence that did not abate, in the gymnasium his father installed for him. The world of outdoors was a source of delight and adventure. His boy's love for birds and insects developed into the scientist's ardor for solid knowledge. When he went to college in the autumn of 1876, it was with the determination to become a faunal naturalist.

His years at Harvard were years of growth and joyous companionship. He studied hard, he read widely and deeply, he plunged into a dozen different undergraduate activities, from boxing and fencing and football to acting and writing and Sunday-school teaching and discussion of art at Professor Charles Eliot Norton's. He romped one day, he wrote history the next; he made many friends; he gained a few devoted followers who prophesied great things for him; meanwhile, he grew in body and mind.

He graduated in June, 1880. Shortly after, he married Alice Lee of Chestnut Hill, who had been

the radiant center of the group of boys and girls with whom he had "run" during his Harvard years. They went to Europe, where Theodore Roosevelt climbed the Matterhorn for no particular reason except that a pair of Englishmen with whom he had talked seemed to think that they were the only ones who had ever climbed it or ever would; and returned to America, more ardently American than ever, and settled in New York.

He had long given up his intention of becoming a naturalist, without, however, being able to decide what he would become. With no great enthusiasm for the law, he entered the Columbia Law School and, at the same time, the law office of his uncle, Robert Roosevelt. Meanwhile he completed a history of "The Naval War of 1812" which he had begun in college, looked about in the political world of his native city, and joined the Republican Club of the Twenty-first Assembly District.

He became a factor, if not a power, there at once, and on the initiative of a shrewd, keen-witted Irishman named "Joe" Murray, a local "boss," was nominated for the Assembly within a year, and elected.

In Albany he sprang almost at once into leadership. Before his first term was over he was a national figure, at the end of his third he was a force to be reckoned with in the Republican Party, head of his State dele