Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
Page 325
| natural bent, and the Roosevelt children are real children. At Groton I met Ted, the oldest, with his arm in a sling, a token from the football game and also from a scrap he had had with another lad who called him “the first boy in the land” and got a good drubbing for it. “I wish,” said Ted to me in deep disgust, “that my father would soon be done holding office. I am sick and tired of it.” |
| It was not long after that that Ted fell ill with pneumonia, and his brother Archie sent him his painfully scrawled message of sympathy: “I hop you are beter.” His father keeps it, I know, in that sacred place in his heart where lie treasured the memories of letters in childish scrawl that brought home even to the trenches before Santiago, with the shrapnel cracking overhead. |
| There are other lessons than spelling and grammar to be learned in Washington,—lessons of democracy, too, in their way. I have heard of the policeman of the White House Squad who was discharged for cause, and appealed to the little lad who answers roll-call with the police on holidays and salutes the sergeant as gravely as the men in blue and brass. |