however, accuracy had been sacrificed to wit. The child born on October
27, 1858, had been all too easy to hold. Memories lasted through life
of nights torn by asthma, when he had scarcely been able to breathe.
There remained recollections, half vivid and half vague, "of my father
walking up and down the room with me in his arms . . . of sitting up
in bed gasping, with my father and mother trying to help me," ² of
nights when a rig had been hurriedly summoned from a near-by stable.
Then he had been bundled in rugs and had been held in his father's
strong arms while the carriage careened through the silent streets, and
the boy's lungs caught the wind as it passed. ³

When he was old enough, the boy detested his puny body. He was
ashamed of eyes so weak that one failed entirely before he was fifty.
In those days of childhood illness lies the clew to the evangelical vitality
of later years. Theodore Roosevelt, by unending persistence, developed
his body to outward, if physiologically imperfect, strength. Any one who
did less was a weakling. Any one who did less was no true patriot. So
came the Gospel of Strenuosity, and the extraordinary rambles through
streams and gorges in which the President of the United States led a
file of panting, sweating, silently cursing diplomats, army officers, and
Cabinet members.

The urge for physical fitness did not come for some years. He was
an owlish, wistful boy; tall for his age at ten or eleven years, with a thin
body and pipestem legs, with fair hair that was seldom combed, with
blue eyes that took in, despite extreme nearsightedness, minute details
of an absorbing world. He read constantly, and listened in solemnity
to the conversations of his parents while his small brother and sisters
played. At seven, he had decided upon the life of a naturalist and about
him, until he went to college, clung odors of moribund frogs and worms,
and of formaldehyde. The Theodore Roosevelt of later years was the
most adolescent of men. He often said that the days of the Spanish War,
when he led his men against a hail of inaccurately aimed bullets, were
the most glorious of his life. Failure to receive the Medal of Honor for
his exploits had been a grief as real as any of those which swamp child-
hood in despair. "You must always remember," wrote Cecil Spring
Rice in 1904, "that the President is about six." ⁴

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