CHAPTER 3 Hermann Hagedorn’s: The Boy’s Life of Theodore Roosevelt.

HE  GOES  ON HIS  TRAVELS AND LEARNS A THING OR TWO
MRS.  ROOSEVELT'S mother, Mrs.  Bulloch, most recklessly indulgent of grandmothers, died soon after the close of the war.  Anna Bulloch married.  The relief activities growing out of the war no longer demanded the elder Theodore Roosevelt's constant attention; his own business in Maiden Lane more or less ran itself.  Theodore Roosevelt, therefore, determined to take his family abroad for a year of travel through Europe.  They sailed from New York on the Scotia for Liverpool on May 12, 1869. 

Theodore Roosevelt the younger was ten and a half years old "a tall, thin lad, with bright eyes and legs like pipestems," as a fellow traveler on the Scotia years after described him.  To him a trip to Europe appeared very much as it would appear to most boys of ten and a half.  A trip to Africa or to China would have been a wild and glorious adventure.  Very few people went to either place, but everybody went to Europe.  A trip to Europe, therefore, was not an adventure at all.  It was a nuisance. 

He thought it was a nuisance the day he sailed, and he did not change his mind.  He was shown everything between the Trossachs and Vesuvius, but it made no difference.  Now and then some "sight" or other interested him mildly, but on the whole he showed himself utterly thick-skinned to every point of beauty or history.  This was curious in one who was as sensitive as he to impressions gained from books.  He was homesick the day he sailed and he continued to be homesick until the day he set foot again on American soil. 

We have the best of authorities for his daily doings and his state of mind during this unhappy year.  For, the day he sailed, he made another brave attempt to keep a diary.  His first attempt, the preceding summer, had not been very successful.  After twelve days that journal had petered out.  But in the intervening months Theodore's spine had evidently stiffened.  He kept his European diary, with scarcely a break, for eight months.  It reveals the pleasantest little boy imaginable. 

He was seasick on the way over, and in Europe was evidently ill much of the time, suffering from his old trouble, but he never complains, though, "I was sick of the Asthma last night," is a note that occurs again and again in the diary. 

The entry under date of June 26th is characteristic: "In the morning a doctor came to us and said my lungs were perfect.  In the afternoon we went to a riding-school and I was thrown. "

On September 26th he writes: "I was sick of the Asthma last night.  I sat up for 4 successive hours, and Papa made me smoke a cigar. "
At Munich, in October, he makes this entry: "In the night I had a nightmare dreaming that the devil was carrying me away and had collorer morbos (a sickness that is, not very dangerous) but Mama patted me with her delicate fingers"

Whether it was Theodore or the devil who had '' collorer morbos'' remains unsettled.  What is noteworthy in this entry, besides the unconscious humor of it, is the boy's charming reference to his mother.  Throughout this diary his attitude toward his parents is unusually tender.  He frankly resents their dragging him over Europe when he would much prefer to be home, but he takes pains to point out to himself that (according to their lights) they are trying to be good to him. 

He makes this entry at Vienna, on October 3d: "As I was not well Papa and I went to the country.  This excursion was in some respects similar to Hastings England.  There were only 2 of us.  I put myself to bed with noboddy in the room.  We had a nice walk alone, had Sunday school out, &c.  but I did not enjoy myself so much.  We got there just before dinner.  After it we walked in company with Papas friends (or as I thought them enemy) I having a miserable time (but it was not Fathers fault) untill we came home.  Then Papa and I went a long roam through the wood and had Sunday school in them.  I drew a church and I am now going to bed. "

A month or two later, at Dijon, he writes in much the same mood: "I was expecting a sociable evening and Mama tried to make it so, but Papa effectively stoped it by telling me a french friend which I must have when we come back to Paris and when I went to bed I cried for homesickness and a wish to get out of a land where friends (or as I think them enemys) who can not speak my language are forced on me. "

At that point it evidently occurred to him that he had possibly been not quite just to his father, for he closes the day's entry with the remark, "Papa and Mama both tried to make me have a sociable time. "

There is no question about his devotion to his father.  At Munich, he writes, "Papa, Mama, and Bamie went to an opera and Father was more handsome than I ever saw him. " Mr.  Roosevelt was evidently put to it at times to entertain his youthful and reluctant fellow-travelers, for on the train to Amsterdam, Theodore the younger relates: "Father told us such a nice story about a man who drowned his wife because his wife said his pants was cut with a scisor while he insisted that it was cut with a knife" the moral being that people who are stub-bornly fussy are likely-to come to a violent end. 

The "sights" of Europe made practically no impression whatever on Theodore or his younger brother and sister.  He scarcely mentions them, in fact.  "At Oxford," he writes, casually, "we drove around it and saw some colages. " The next day, he relates, "We went to Westminster Abbey and a man showed us the old tombs and all that round the church. " All he has to say of the Lake Country is a word concerning a climb at Windermere, "The view was splendid on the top and it was very windy and I bought a sweet cracker. "

Once there was a dramatic encounter, which Theodore records thus: "We went to our cousins school at Waterloo.  We had a nice time but met Jeff Davises son and some sharp words ensued. "

The thing that the Roosevelt children evidently enjoyed most, however, was exploring.  At York, Theodore writes: "Conie and I went alone to the museum where we saw birds and skeletons and Bamie and I went in for a spree and got two shillings worth of rock candy. " At Ouchy, "I took a walk around town investigating matters and petted a beautiful black pussey who as soon as I went away ran after me untill I peted her. " At Chamonix, "I found several specimens to keep and we went on the great glacier called ' Mother of ice. ''' (Theodore's French was a bit weak. ) "We explored the hotel (Conie, Ellie and I)," he continues, "and met with several cross chambermaids. "

"We saw a palace of the doges," he writes in Venice.  "It looks like a palace you could be comfortable and snug in (which is not usual) We went to another church in which Conie jumped over tombstones spanked me banged Ellies head &c. "

This sounds exciting, and one wonders with trepidation what unmentioned form of violence "&c" stands for; but glorious rough-houses of that sort were evidently few, in church or out. 

We are fortunate in having the vigorous Conie's own enlightening comment on the glories of Europe.  She, too, was writing a diary, though she was only eight, and here is the record of a day in Paris:

"I am so glad Mama has let me stay in the butiful hotel parlor while the poor boys have been dragged off to the orful picture galery. "

It was in November that the Roosevelts went to Paris, but Theodore the younger did not find the gay city any more attractive than Conie found it, for the asthma overcame him again and he had to stay in bed.  "I stayed in the house all day," he records on November 26th, "varying the day with brushing my hair, washing my hands and thinking in fact haveing a verry dull time. "

"Nov.  27.     I Did the same thing as yesterday. "

That does not sound exciting at all. 

All that year he corresponded off and on with Conie's friend, Edith Carow, aged eight.  "We boys and Conie have some boy and girl friends here," he writes from Rome, "and have quite a nice time but we want to get home.  We play soilder on the Pinchen Hill and Conie was bugler but is not now.  We have six soildiers.  I wont be captain because the soildiers sometimes rebel, and somehow the rebels always beat.  We rebel when the captain is to stern.  You are my most faithful correspondent.  Ever yours, T.  Roosevelt. "

In another letter he remains "Evere your loving friend. " In fact, during the time he was ill in Paris, "sick and in dull spirits," as he wrote her, he conceived a decidedly sentimental feeling for the little lady whose name he insisted for some reason on spelling "Eidieth. "

This is the diary's evidence under date of November 22d: "In the evening mama showed me the portrait of Eidieth Carow and her face stired up in me homesickness and longings for the past which will come again never aback never. "

With which romantic reflection we will close the record of Theodore Roosevelt's first journey through Europe. 

To Theodore, aged eleven, the beauties of Naples and Rome and Venice and the historic places even of England and Holland, the lands of his ancestors, were far less thrilling than the sight of a certain stuffed bird in the "departent of nests" in the museum in Vienna.  He had seen birds of that kind wild at home.  He had seen no "ancient monuments" or palaces, and he did not know what to make of them.  The fact is that he, who was precocious mentally, was in the matter of true understanding slow to develop.  He moved from discovery to discovery laboriously.  For him there were no leaps forward. 

Theodore, Ellie, and Conie returned to America in May, 1870, as blatantly confident that America was "God's country" and that Europe was a degenerate Old World which would shortly be kicked into outer darkness by the New as any three spread-eagle patriots who ever crossed the sea.  Theodore the younger returned joyously to his books and his bugs and the society of certain cousins whom he could safely regard as friends, since they spoke his language.  He went to school very little, or not at all, for his health was no better than it had been.  A succession of tutors injected into him the fundamentals of book-learning, while a growing intimacy with his father gave him the deeper education of the spirit. 

Father and son saw much of each other those years, especially in the summers which the Roosevelts spent within reach of New York, now at Madison, New Jersey, now at Dobbs Ferry on the Hudson, now at Barrytown, now somewhere else, each summer in a different place, in the hope that somewhere they would find a spot where Theodore the younger might be freed for a time from the agonies of his asthma.  Mr.  Roosevelt was immensely fond of driving a four-in-hand or a spike team that is, a pair with a third horse in the lead and, driving or riding, he liked to have his children at his side.  Apart from his recurring periods of illness never more than ten days apart the summers were a delight to Theodore.  He had every variety of pet cats, dogs, rabbits, even a 'coon, besides the pony, General Grant, which his first diary mentions.  As he wrote, many years later, "the seasons went by in a round of uninterrupted and enthralling pleasures," for there were the haying and harvesting to supervise, there were apples to pick, there were frogs and woodchucks to hunt, there were nuts to gather.  They played Indians, building wigwams in the woods and staining themselves (and their clothes) with poke-cherry juice, not always to the delight of parents even as patient and understanding as theirs. 

Meanwhile   he   was   continuing   his   studies   in natural history, devoting himself now not to "misqueto hawks" and "beettles," but to mammals and birds.  It was in.  the summer after he became thirteen that his first gun was given to him a breech-loading, pin-fire, double-barrel of French manufacture which had a reputation of being as nearly fool-proof as a gun can be.  The Roosevelts were living at Dobbs Ferry and it was there that summer that Theodore discovered, quite by accident, that he was at a hopeless disadvantage as a hunter; for birds which his friends shot right and left he could not even see.  Spectacles literally opened an entirely new world for him.  Countless beauties which he had never imagined existed stood suddenly revealed. 

His work as a naturalist now developed from a mere boys' pastime into actual and more or less scientific study.  In a musty little shop he discovered a former companion of Audubon's, a tall, cleanshaven, white-haired old gentleman named Bell, who subsequently gave him lessons in taxidermy and spurred and directed his interest in collecting specimens for mounting and preservation.  He had another friend at that time, Hilborrie West, a connection by marriage of his mother's, an intimate of many of the most noted scientists of his generation, who was neither an original thinker himself nor even a learned man, but who had the rare ability of explaining in words of one syllable the intricate theories and discoveries of his profounder brethren.  It was through the clear interpretation of Hilborne West that Theodore the younger made his first acquaintance with the ideas of Darwin and Huxley, which were then shaking the foundations of science and religion. 

Theodore Roosevelt was now in his 'teens, physically still "pig-chested and asthmatic" and undersized, but mentally reaching out into the great dominion of knowledge, a boy from his heels up, but a studious boy who took books with enormous seriousness and was reading more in a year than most boys read in ten.  He read sitting down and he read standing up; at times even he read standing on only one leg "like a pelican in the wilderness" supporting the other against the thigh of the first and using it as a book-rest.  His tastes were liberal and the books he devoured ranged from tales of the wildest adventure to Little Women, An Old-fashioned Girl, and A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life.  He loved Midshipman Easy and heartily disliked The Swiss Family Robinson, because he realized that it was scientifically false.  The old epics thrilled him.  The heroes of the ballads were still his heroes.  More ardently than ever he wanted to be like them. 

And then something happened. 

For, one day, he picked up the Dramatic Romances of Browning and read "The Flight of the Duchess"j and he had not read far before he came on a description of a young duke, a poor sprig of a grand line:
the pertest little ape That ever affronted human shape;
and this was the duke's ambition:

All that the old Dukes had been without knowing it, This Duke would fain know he was, without being it.  
In other words, the duke admired his ancestors and wanted to appear to be like them without making any effort actually to be like them. 

Those lines pulled Theodore Roosevelt up sharp, like a lassoo.  He felt that the resemblance between that young duke and himself was close enough to be disquieting.  He felt discovered; he felt ashamed.  He, too, had had his heroes.  He' had wanted to be like those heroes; or had he wanted merely to appear to be like them ?

Those lines made him unhappy.  They pursued him, taunting him.  Then one day he suddenly discovered that a new resolve had taken shape in him.  There was no harm in dreaming, but henceforth he would not be satisfied unless, even while he dreamed, he labored to translate the dream into action. 

That was a very important resolve.  It gave Theodore Roosevelt back his peace of mind • and set his face in the direction of the highroad. 

It was not long after this new resolve had taken root in him that chance or destiny or the good Lord, who likes to test the vitality of the good resolutions that boys make, put Theodore Roosevelt's high-sounding decision to the test. 

He was, even at thirteen, a timid boy, as children who are frail physically are apt to be.  He had not had enough rough contact with boys to become accustomed to being hurt, and to give blows and take punishment as a matter of course; and his younger brother Elliott, who suffered from none of the ailments which pursued Theodore, had in consequence been his protector against bullies more than once.  It happened, in the summer of '72, however, that certain bullies descended on Theodore at a time when Elliott was a little more than five hundred miles away. 

Theodore had been suffering more than usual from asthma and had been sent to Moosehead Lake in Maine in the hope that the clear, crisp air would give him relief.  The last lap of the journey was by stage-coach, and on the coach with Theodore were two boys who were not slow in discovering that here was a victim sent to them from on high.  They were not really bullies, but they were strong, wholesome, mischievous boys, and Theodore was just a gift to them to break the tedium of the journey.  They proceeded forthwith to make him miserable, and succeeded.  He endured their attentions as long as he could; then he tried to fight. 

He was plucky, without question.  Perhaps he had visions of perishing nobly against overwhelming odds.  But no such fate was his.  The boys took him singly and handled him like a kitten.  And the worst of it all was, they did not even really hurt him.  They didn't have to, he was so easy to handle. 

Theodore Roosevelt spent his time at Moosehead Lake thinking this over.  He remembered the deeds of the men he most admired, the men he wanted most to be like.  And then he thought of the silly duke; and of something his father had recently said to him: "You have the mind, but you haven't the body.  It is hard work to build up the body. "

He remembered certain tiresome exercises his father had persuaded him to go through daily in the gymnasium on the third floor.  And then he thought of his resolution. 

He made up his mind then and there that if he was ever to be anything but a parody of the heroes of his dreams, he must first make himself fit physically to bear what they had borne, to fight as they had fought. 

He decided to take boxing-lessons. 

This was a praiseworthy decision; but what was really praiseworthy was the fact that when he returned to New York he confided the whole matter to his father, and, with the elder Theodore Roosevelt's enthusiastic approval, sought out a certain John Long, an exprize-fighter, and doggedly set to work,

In the winter following his son's memorable humiliation at Moosehead Lake, Theodore Roosevelt the elder took his family oversea a second time.  Theodore Junior's health was giving his parents anxiety, and they determined, therefore, to see what a winter in Egypt would do for it. 

It was toward the close of 1872 that the Roosevelts landed in Alexandria, bag, baggage, and taxidermy outfit.  At Cairo they engaged a dahabiyeh and began a leisurely sail up the Nile, which lasted two months or more and proved to Theodore the younger a continuous delight, broken only now and then by certain tiresome French lessons by "Bamie," which Mr.  Roosevelt insisted on in order that the younger children should during this play-winter not utterly forget that there was such a thing as work in the world.  

Theodore, Ellie, and Conie, on foot and on donkey-back, scrambled happily among ruins that winter, seeking out the most dangerous places as a matter of course.  But Theodore did something besides.  The "Roosevelt Museum of Natural History" had before his departure printed a set of special Roosevelt Museum labels in pink ink and given Theodore the younger a roving commission to bring home all the specimens he could.  He was not one to treat lightly a commission of that sort.  Morning, noon, and night he was out, terrifying not only the natives but the members of his own family, when he cavorted hither or yon on donkey-back, with his gun at a reckless angle.  His bird-collecting gave the Nile journey its chief zest.  He had picked up in Cairo an excellent book on the birds of Egypt, and deliberately set to work to gather something better than merely a boy amateur's collection. 

Theodore Roosevelt was very much the Young Professor that winter.  He took himself with enormous seriousness and played the part of the abstracted and single-minded naturalist, dedicated to science and aloof from the general world of human pleasures, as persistently as his natural boyish vitality and love of a wholesome good time would permit.  Like Kipling's famous Cat, he walked by his "wild lone. " There was something of Don Quixote about him during that period, especially when he was on donkey-back charging toward a "specimen," seeing the specimen and nothing else in heaven or on earth.  The fact that he suddenly began to grow that winter and was bulging out of his clothes in all directions long before the dahabiyeh could return to Cairo, where tailors were, distinctly added to his bizarre appearance.  He saved himself from being a joke mainly because, with all his queerness, he was such good company and so absolutely square, and had such a reliable sense of humor besides. 

The Roosevelt family went from Egypt to the Holy Land, and thence to Constantinople and Greece, and finally Vienna, where the elder Theodore Roosevelt had official duties as American Commissioner sent by President Grant to the International Exposition.  Everywhere, Theodore the younger collected specimens.  That was all very nice for Theodore and did not bother the family.  But wherever he went he also dissected specimens and followed the vocation of taxidermist. 

A taxidermist, as any one who has had experience will admit, is bad enough in his place, his place being a dingy shop well removed from the paths of human travel.  The trouble with Theodore was that his taxidermy laboratories were the hotel bedrooms which he shared with his brother Elliott. 

It happened in Vienna one day that Elliott, who happened to be the neatest and most particular of mortals, came to his father with a rather woebegone expression. 

"Father, do you think it would be extravagant," he inquired, "if I were now and then to have a room to myself in hotels?"

"'I suppose not, if you really wish it," said Mr.  Roosevelt.  "But why?"

Elliott did not try to explain.  '' Come and see our room," he said. 

Mr.  Roosevelt did.  There were bottles on the tables and the chairs; there were bottles on the mantel and the wash-stand.  Clothes were every-where where they happened to fall and in the basin were the entrails of animals recently deceased. 

What Mr.  Roosevelt said and did about Elliott's rebellion has not come down to us.  He was evidently unable to do much with Theodore at the moment, for it is recorded that Theodore remained "grubby" for some time to come.  Theodore was intent on scientific investigation, and neither his father's admonitions nor his brother's appeals could swerve him from what he conceived to be the path of duty. 

There was something ruthless in his persistence.  He had a tender heart, an affectionate nature.  He loved his father with a devotion such as he never gave again to any other man; he was deeply attached to his exquisite Southern mother.  And yet, when he saw before him a goal to be attained, he disregarded even them.  There was about him an almost terrible single-mindedness.  He saw the goal and nothing else.  If it seemed to him necessary to the interests of science to keep defunct field-mice in the family refrigerator, he kept them there; if it seemed to him important to house a snake or two in the guest-room water-pitcher, the possible emotions of a guest discovering them there did not enter into consideration.  He felt it his duty to study field-mice and snakes and that was all there was about it.  

"My boy, my boy," said his mother, not without apprehension, "you are a little berserker. "

Which means that in certain respects Theodore Roosevelt the younger was, at fourteen, with all his natural tenderness and charm, something of a savage. 

In the spring of '73 Mr.  Roosevelt returned to New York.  Mrs.  Roosevelt and "Bamie" went to Carlsbad, where Mrs.  Roosevelt was to take the cure, and the other children were left with a German family in Dresden.  Their cousins, Maud and John Elliott, were living in Dresden with their mother, and with them the Roosevelt children formed the "Dresden Literary American Club. " This "club" possessed a copy-book in which once a week each member of the society entered his or her contribution.  In this copy-book his cousin, Maud Elliott, aged eleven or thereabouts, wrote a story called "The Birthday," of which Theodore was the rather dubious hero; her description of him sounds accurate. 

Well, my dear little friends [she writes] I must tell you something about Theodore you know he was a naturalist on a small scale, he was a very amusing boy but he had a great fault he was very absent minded so much so that whenever his Mother would tell him to go and do something for her he would say "Oh yes you pretty little thing" but instead of doing it directly he would go and skin his birds or something that he took into his head to skin, and then he always thought that he could do things better than anyone else. 

Theodore, Ellie, and Conie spent three months or more in Dresden, in the family of an alderman and member of the Reichstag, Doctor Minkwitz, whose daughter undertook to teach them German.  To Theodore the life in the house of these typical Germans, who were a little stiff and formal, but endlessly patient and kind, had extraordinary charm.  He had difficulties with the language, but he felt at home in no time and promptly took up his established round of existence, which included hedgehogs and reptiles of all sorts and taxidermy and pleasant walks through what was known as Saxon Switzerland.  He found the sons of his host, who were corps-students, curious and fascinating.  One of them was a noted swordsman and was called Der rote Herzog (the Red Duke); another had had the tip of his nose cut off in a duel and sewn on again and was subsequently known as Herr Nasehorn (Sir Rhinoceros).  He liked these heroes of the student world.  There was an old painter named Wegener who gave him drawing-lessons and held wise and friendly discourses on their rambles through the neighboring hills.  But besides these his German acquaintances were few, for he was constantly suffering from asthma and frequently found conversation difficult.  He was, therefore, thrown all the more intimately into the companionship of books. 

It was this summer that he first read the Nibelungenlied. 

The gorgeous old epic made a profound impression upon him.  Instantly Rudiger and Hagen, Hildebrand and Dietrich von Bern became heroes of his imagination beside the heroes of the Norse sagas and the epics of Greece.  The intrepid courage of then who could face life and face death calmly and with clear eyes, rating life not too highly in the balance with what they deemed justice, set quivering every aspiration in his heart.  The fierce grandeur of the song kindled his blood; and his spirit unawares took over some of the primitive battle ardor of it, and made it its own. 

The Roosevelts returned to America that autumn and Theodore immediately set to work to prepare seriously for college.  His education had, owing to his frequent illnesses, been so haphazard that, while he was far ahead of his age in certain subjects, he was hopelessly behind in others.  His sister "Bamie," now eighteen, and Theodore's unofficial guardian, secured a tutor for him, and Theodore, who would have much preferred to run wild among "specimens," gritted his teeth and resigned himself to the agonies of Latin and mathematics. 

Theodore the younger was now fifteen, a slender boy with glasses, gifted, alert, energetic, dreaming deeply, but increasingly aware of the struggle it is to translate dreams into reality.  He was an unusual boy, but he was in no sense a genius.  Physically he was decidedly below the average; mentally he was bright but by no means brilliant.  He had a good memory and unusual power of concentration; and he liked books.  In that fall of 1873 there were probably scattered over the United States hundreds of boys fifteen years old more gifted than he.  What Theodore Roosevelt had, which most of the others had not, was a deep hunger to excel, to be of the fellowship of the doers of great deeds.  With it, vague at first but increasingly clear, came the recognition that men attain only through endless struggle against the sloth, the impurity, the fears, the doubts, the false content in their own hearts.  He determined to build up for himself a clean, valiant, fighting soul. 

This was not an easy undertaking.  He had lofty impulses and the best of intentions; he was naturally religious; he was singularly pure-minded; but he was still timid.  A sea-captain in one of Marryat's novels helped him here; for this captain admits to a frightened midshipman that once he, too, was afraid.  But he had determined at least to appear unafraid and, though he was not brave, at least to act as though he were.  And after a while he had actually become that which at first he had only feigned. 

Theodore Roosevelt took that sea-captain's lesson to heart. 

While he was developing the muscles of his spirit, Theodore Roosevelt was with no less persistence developing the muscles of his body.     He was not a natural athlete, but, by dint of steady work he gradually  became,   not  a  champion,   even  among boys of his own age, but an average boxer able in an emergency to defend himself even against opponents physically more powerful than himself.     Once, in a series of "championship" matches held by his teacher, the ex-prize-fighter, he did win a pewter cup in the light-weight   contest.     That was not much, but Theodore thought that it was decidedly better than being tossed about like a fuzzy rabbit by a couple of boys at Moosehead Lake.  He boxed and wrestled in the winters, and in the gymnasium of the new house at 6 West Fifty-seventh Street, into which the Roosevelt’s had moved after their return from Europe in the autumn of '73, chinned himself and struggled with the parallel bars patiently day after day.  He saw clearly what few boys of his age ever see at all that if you intend to build high you must first build deep. 

It was in the summer of '74 that Mr. Roosevelt leased a rambling old house at Oyster Bay, which was subsequently known as "Tranquillity. " His brothers had already established themselves on land near by, and thereafter the numerous cousins spent their vacations hunting, exploring, and cheerfully risking their necks in and about the woods and waters of Long Island's north shore.  Theodore hunted and collected specimens with the same persistence he had shown in Egypt, but with growing knowledge and insight.  He studied the flowers, and the songs of birds began to have for him the deeper significance they have for those who know the life-story of each unseen singer.  He was unusual, inasmuch as, with all his passion for science, he had a profound feeling for beauty.  The outdoor world stirred and stimulated not only his intellect, but his spirit; and his spirit, imaginative and audacious, soared to new mountain-tops looking for new worlds to conquer.