Topic 28 
A VARIED READING DIET

IN his travels Colonel Roosevelt's reading was catholic in scope.  It ranged from a volume of "Plutarch's Lives," he may have taken from his library, a bulletin of some learned society picked up from a desk as he was about to leave home, or a popular magazine filled with detective stories or tales of adventure.

"I wish," he would say as we were arriving in a town, "that you would try and get me a copy of the Red Book; there's a detective story in that I want to finish"; or, "see if you cannot pick up a copy of Adventure.  I am somewhat of an adventurer myself and want to know what the rest of the tribe may be interested in just now."

Once I remarked that this was "rather low brow diet."

"True," he said, "but why feed entirely on the heavier stuff? I get all the 'high brow' magazines at home.  Lord! I don't read one half of them.  This lowbrow stuff, as you call it, is good for a change.  I like a good detective story when I can get it.  These things may not be literature, but they interest and rest me.  They make up the salads of my reading.

"You remember old Senator Hoar from your State? Do you remember that he was addicted to dime novels? That used to be a shock to some very good people who imagined the Senator lived on the Transcript and the Congressional Record when he was not devouring law books and even heavier things.  Some saw in this evidence of total depravity on the old man's part — an evil example to the young.  It was merely his way of relaxing and resting up between times.

" I was very fond of Hoar, though I did not know him as well as I would have liked to.  I have often laughed at that mot of his on 'Ben' Butler's funeral.  You remember some one asked the Senator if he were going to attend it.

"'No,' he is said to have replied, 'but I approve of it.'"