CHAPTER 2 Hermann Hagedorn’s: The Boy’s Life of Theodore Roosevelt.

HE  GROWS

WHILE Grant was hammering toward Richmond in the autumn of 1864 Theodore Roosevelt celebrated his sixth birthday.  He was now old enough to realize faintly that beneath the smooth surface of life in the house on Twentieth Street there ran cross-currents of divergent opinion which failed to wreck the happiness of the household only because of the calm good sense and mutual affection of his father and mother.  Mrs.  Roosevelt, her sister Anna, and their mother, Mrs.  Bulloch, were as fervently for the South in 1864 as they had been in 1861.  Mr.  Roosevelt was as ardently a Lincoln Republican.  Mrs.  Roosevelt, moreover, was no more than her husband one to support a cause half-heartedly or only with words.  Surreptitiously, at intervals, boxes were packed with certain necessities which were becoming increasingly rare in the South.  The Roosevelt children were permitted to help, and found it a thrilling experience, made more thrilling still by the admonition that their father (who probably knew all about it, anyway, and agreed to pretend that he didn't) must not be told of it.  There were hints of blockade-runners who should bear these boxes to aunts and uncles in Savannah; and promptly Theodore the younger invented a game wherein he was the blockade (on one of the bridges over the bridle-paths in Central Park) and various boys and girls, mostly cousins, were the runners.  It is noteworthy that he took the Union side even there.  He was an ardent and vociferous Northerner.  Once, in fact, when he felt that he had been wronged by maternal discipline, he took vengeance on his mother by praying at her knee with loud fervor for the success of the Union arms.  His mother, it appears, had a sense of humor and was much amused, though she warned him not to repeat the offense, under penalty of being reported to the head of the family. 

The war ended.  A gigantic struggle, which had almost shattered the splendid dream of the founders of the Republic, had broken out, raged for four years, and subsided.  To Theodore Roosevelt the younger it was just a rumbling in the distance, and, now and then, a source of self-questioning why his father should look this way or his mother should act that way.  The rumblings ceased, the questionings were forgotten.  There came possibly an exciting echo of both when Uncle Jimmy, whose real name was James Dunwoodie Bulloch and who had been a Captain in the Confederate navy, came on a stealthy visit with his brother Irvine to see the sister who had married Theodore Roosevelt.  They came under assumed names, for they were noteworthy people and had been excepted from the general amnesty extended to those who had taken up arms against the Union.  Uncle Jimmy had in an English port built the famous Confederate sea-raider Alabama, long the terror of Northern shipping; Uncle Irvine had, as a midshipman, fired the last gun discharged from her batteries in the fight with the Kearsarge.  As far as young Theodore was concerned, they were like shadows that came and were gone. 

He was living his own life in his own small world.  That world consisted practically of nothing but the house on East Twentieth Street and the house next door and the two yards (made into one); but as far as it went it was interesting and full of things to thrill an inquisitive boy.  His father's brother Robert lived in No.  26.  Both houses had wide porches to the rear, overlooking their own yards and the gardens of the Goelet mansion on Nineteenth Street, and were the playground in which the children were deposited daily in "piazza clothes" to romp to their hearts' content.  Uncle Robert's
house was quite extraordinarily interesting, for Uncle Robert's wife had a taste for animals of various kinds, domestic and otherwise.  She had for a brief but exciting period kept a cow in the back yard (brought thither through the basement and the kitchen); but the neighbors did not encourage her attempt at city dairying and the cow was forced to depart in the way that she had come.  There were other, less placid animals on the piazzas and the upper floors.  There were parrots and pheasants and peacocks and other birds of beautiful plumage,
and on the lower piazza was a monkey that terrified the children of No.  28. 

Theodore Roosevelt the elder believed in work, but he believed quite as emphatically in play, and Theodore the younger was an enthusiastic play-boy from the start.  His elder sister, whom he called "Bamie," was now ten years old, a mature little lady, and from his point of view (and from hers) practically grown up.  She associated mainly with her parents.  Theodore's closest companions were his brother Elliott, known as Ellie, and his younger sister, Corinne, known as Conie.  There was another who began a. t this date to figure largely in his life.  This was a friend of Conie's who lived next to their grandfather's house on Union Square.  She was three years old, a daughter, six weeks older than Conie, of a friend of Mrs.  Roosevelt's; and her name was Edith Kermit Carow.  From all accounts she was a nice little girl and she liked Theodore, and included him in games of "house" from which Ellie was excluded.  He was a delicate boy, and he had a gentle way with him which Conie and Edith, who were rather little, gratefully appreciated. 

Theodore was the undisputed king of the nursery, even though Ellie and Conie, as they grew, developed into the most "rambunctious" of wild Indians and he himself remained delicate and to all intents and purposes a chronic invalid.  Almost from babyhood he had suffered from asthma; for years he could sleep only in a sitting posture.  But he was a patient youngster who bore pain and the thoughtless lack of consideration of the other children with unusual self-control and forbearance.  He dominated his suffering from the beginning, reading and playing and telling stories in spite of it.  His stories were magical, and enthralled Ellie and Conie and Edith and the various cousins who gathered in the nursery to listen.  They were all about the wonderful adventures of people who lived in trees and deep forests, and were always "continued in our next," sometimes for months on end, never reaching a conclusion. 

It was a small world in which he lived a quiet, proper world with few rough corners.  Most boys spend their first half-dozen years in narrow worlds such as his, but at six they go to school and immediately the world for them expands, taking in countless new individuals each with his  own particular circle.  Except for a few months at Professor McMullen's academy on Twentieth Street, within a stone's throw of the house where he lived, Theodore did not go to school.  Because of the frailness of his body, he was given no opportunity to experience the sharp contact with boys of all ages  which school offers.  His mind, moreover, was not fed with the varied interests that occupy large groups of boys, working and playing together.    It turned hungrily, therefore, to the world  of the imagination and the world of books.  

Theodore's imaginative mind, which made him so wonderful a story-teller and so satisfactory a playmate to Conie and Edith in their games of make-believe, was a source of vivid delight, but also occasionally of acute terror.  There was the adventure with that man-eating monster called the "zeal," for instance. 

    It happened one day that he was playing tag in Madison Square, just three blocks north of Twentieth Street, a pleasant park for children in those days, a mile or more away from the business section of the city and as quiet as a side-street in Brooklyn.  A Presbyterian church stood on the east side of the square and he drifted toward it, drawn irresistibly by the spirit of adventure.  It was Saturday.  The sexton was airing the building, and the front portal was open.  Theodore peered curiously, but cautiously, in. 

"Step inside," said the sexton, hospitably. 

"No, thank you," answered Theodore. 

"Why not?"

The boy hesitated.  "I know what you've got in there," he said, at last. 

The sexton was amused.  '' I haven't got anything that little boys shouldn't see," he said, encouragingly.  "Come on in and look around. "

Theodore cast a glance around the pews and galleries.  The spirit of adventure was struggling within him with timidity.  But timidity won.  "No, I I'd rather not," he said, and he ran over to the park again. 
But adventure called.  The open church fascinated him and he returned to it again and again.  But he did not enter. 

He told his mother about the hospitable sexton. 

"Why didn't you go in?" she asked. 

He was shy about explaining.  Possibly he was shy about exposing his timidity.  But after a little urging he reluctantly admitted that he had been afraid lest the "zeal" should jump out at him from some pew or other hiding-place in the shadowy church. 

"The zeal?" his mother asked.  "What on earth do you mean by the zeal?"

"Why," explained Theodore, "I suppose it is some big animal like a dragon or an alligator.  I went there to church last Sunday with Uncle Robert, and I heard the minister read from the Bible about the zeal, and it made me afraid. "

Mrs.  Roosevelt turned to the Concordance, and one after another read the texts that contained the word "zeal. " Suddenly Theodore's eyes grew big as he exclaimed, excitedly:

"That's it the last you read. "

It was from the Psalms, "For the zeal of thy house hath eaten me up. "

Theodore, those days, was not taking any chances. 
Life, on the whole, was not an undiluted joy for the youngster in East Twentieth Street.  Time and again his asthma kept him awake half the nights, coughing and trying to breathe.  In those sessions of pain his father was his most devoted companion, and night after night would walk up and down the room with the boy in his arms, or, in summer, take him driving for miles through the countryside in the dead of night.  It was possibly in those nocturnal vigils that the boy's affection for his father deepened into a devotion which the passage of time only strengthened. ^

. Theodore Roosevelt the elder was a man, if there ever was one, to stir a boy of seven or eight to devoted admiration.  He was now thirty-five, tall, stalwart, bearded, with the gentleness of a woman and the courage, energy, and simple heartedness of a backwoodsman; a man-of-universal feeling who touched every side of life, Aunt Anna Bulloch used to say that when lie talked with his children he reminded her of Greatheart in Bunyan.  He was, with all his bigness, very human.  He passionately loved a good time and "he could dance till he was dead. " A boy could cuddle up to him, moreover, and pick his pockets when he came home from business in the evening, confident that he would find something put there to be discovered, though it were such a strange matter as a sick kitten, found whimpering somewhere on the way home.  Theodore the younger was a born hero worshiper.  Delicate boys often are, especially if they have imagination.  It was, therefore, of the greatest moment to the growth of his character that he should have lived those early years so intimately close to a man of such unquestionably heroic stature. 

His father was his first and remained his greatest hero; but he began to read early, and, from his reading, to enlist a company of valiant characters who became the inspiration of his day-dreams and the leaders in his imaginary adventures.  Doctor Livingstone's Travels and Researches was probably the first "grown-up" book that he read, and he must have been very small when he read it, for it is recorded that he was in kilts and could hardly drag the heavy volume from place to place.  The adventures of this intrepid Englishman explorer, naturalist, and apostle of Christ woke his imagination.  Vague and unformed aspirations to be an explorer and naturalist himself, and to carry the light into dark, barbaric places, stirred in him.  He turned to Mayne Reid for further instruction in natural history and for adventures even more thrilling than Livingstone's.  His father, seeing the trend of his interests, placed before him sound and scientific books.  Meanwhile, simultaneously with Conie and Edith, he discovered Our Young Folks, best of children's magazines, and devoured Cast Away in the Cold, Grandfather's Struggle for a Homestead, and other thrilling boy and girl stories which taught no lessons in natural history, but unobtrusively emphasized certain ideals of manly conduct to which his father was, in his friendly way, constantly calling his attention. 

Cooper, too, became a source of more than excited interest.  With Natty Bumppo began his acquaintance with the American pioneer, the hard and narrow, but intrepid, indomitable, self-reliant, fighting frontiersman, the man who clears the forest and, having cleared it, pushes westward into deeper forests, saying little and imagining that he is only carving out his own daily existence, even while he is carving out a nation.  Boone and Dave Crockett joined King Olaf and Morgan's riflemen in that heroic company which inhabited his imaginings. 

Theodore the younger was during those early years primarily an indoor boy, bright as a new dollar, persistent as a mosquito on a summer night when he wanted information, but sickly and nervous much of the time, with good intentions, a will of his own and plenty of dreams, but with no more conception than any other boy of his age of the relation of dreams to accomplishment.  He loved to think about great men; vaguely he wanted some day to be like them; he wanted certainly to be like his father.  Meanwhile, he was a nice little boy who liked books and animals and enjoyed playing with Conie and Edith. 
So much, in general, we know of Theodore Roosevelt, aged nine. 

At this point, now, the boy himself comes out of the past to tell us about himself.  He comes in the shape of a diary written in a cheap notebook.  He kept it in Barrytown, up the Hudson, the summer before he was ten years old.  For twelve days he kept it steadily; then came a break of three days, then another break of nine; then two more attempts; then silence.  He was old enough to feel the need of keeping a diary, but he did not yet have the strength of will to persist at it.  He was very much like other boys of nine, "going on ten. "

In that diary, written (rather badly) for his own interest and intended for no prying eyes, we see Theodore Roosevelt as he truly was that summer before he was ten.  And what he was was just a boy, wholesome, active, loving the things boys love  meadows and brooks and ponies and birds' nests and fishes and candy.  He had a sorrel Shetland pony, named General Grant (after whom, Conie vaguely suspected, the President had been named), a lovable quadruped with the queer habit of always throwing off his rider once as a preliminary to a pleasant morning ride.  With him he rode the highways and byways. 

"I had a ride of six miles before breakfast," he writes one day in August.  "I will always have a ride of six miles before breakfast now. "

There was evidently endless variety to the life, for there is a record of cousins and uncles and friends coming and going.  On the day he began his journal a "Munday" he states that "The first fig of our garden was eatten that evening and uncle Jimmie left us that evening also. " Two departures in a day! A certain Dora came, a certain Annie left.  "My coussin Jimmie arrived and brought me a christal and some stones from Niagra falls.  We played Fort the rest of the day. " Altogether it was an exciting life. 

But it was not altogether a play season.  There is a significant entry under date of August 15th: "All the morning I played store and 'baby. ' In the afternoon I wrote, read and drew.  That afternoon I received a continuence of Washington's life. " The boy who was playing "kid's games" in the mornings, it seems, was beginning to put in some solid reading of two and three volume biographies in the afternoons. 

It was this same summer that Theodore Roosevelt began to take his nature studies with great seriousness.  The immediate stimulus had been the discovery of a dead seal, lying on exhibition in the market on Broadway to which he was occasionally sent before breakfast to buy strawberries.  The seal, which he was told had been caught in the harbor, thrilled his soul with memories of romantic tales of Mayne Reid and others.  Day after day, as long as the seal remained, he haunted the market.  With great earnestness he even measured the seal.  The fact that he did not have a tape measure to determine its girth did not deter him.  He used a folding pocket rule instead, making a careful record of the measurements.  He had for a time a wild ambition of owning and preserving that seal.  That ambition was frustrated.  He did, however, procure the skull, and on the strength of it promptly started the "Roosevelt Museum of Natural History" with two of his cousins. 

Scientific investigation took on a keener interest, with the Museum as a background, and Theodore determined to write a book.  He wrote it in a notebook which was an exact twin of the one in which he conducted his diary.  One suspects that he bought both at the same time "two for five. "

The title of the book is on the first page: '' Natural history on insects.  By Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. " Under it comes the "Preface":

"All these insects are native of North America, Most of the insects are not in other books. 

"I will write about ants first. "

He did, and what he has to say about them is decidedly entertaining.  "Ants are difided into three sorts for every species.  These kinds are officer, soilder and work.  There are about one officer to ten soilders and one soilder to two workers. " He tells about the common black ant and the brown path ant and various other kinds of ants; he tells about spiders and lady bugs and fireflies and horned "beetlles" and dragon-flies and "misqueto" hawks.  "All the insects that I write about in this book,'' he adds, '' inhabbit North America.  Now and then a friend has told me something about them but mostly I have gained their habbits from of servation. ''

The reader is left in suspense concerning the particularly vicious "habbits" he may have gained from them by "ofserv-a-tion. "

The author of "Natural history on insects" adds to his volume a note or two on fishes.  There is something finely simple about his description of a crayfish.  "I need not' describe the form of the crayfish to you," he writes.  "Look at a lobster and you have its form. " The minnow is dismissed with one or two generalities: "The minnow is found in brooks in the same parts as the crayfish and eel.  It eats worms, catipallars, egg, bread, anything in fact.  It swims quite swiftly.  It is about seven inches long when full grown. "
There are several illustrations (by the author) in the book and at the close this personal note:

"P.  S.  My home is in North America.  All these stories were gained by observation. 

"Age.     Nine years.     Born 28th of October. "

The spelling in this "book" is picturesque, but the "ofservation," on the whole, is keen.  Theodore the younger was beginning, feebly, uncertainly, to express in action the faint stirrings of ambition which Livingstone's book had first awakened.