cept as he would call it, "according to my light." But, following this, he never feared the ultimate outcome.

Julian Street, who knew him for years and was frequently with him during the last days, writing in Collier's, said that he never even heard him mention death until the last year before his demise. He then concludes that his reference to it must have come from "a premonition that the end was perhaps nearer than those about him supposed." Continuing, he describes Mr. Roosevelt as he lay in the hospital a few days after his operation, reading a book when he remarked, "Lying here, I have often thought how glad I would be to go now if by doing so I could only bring the boys back safe to Mrs. Roosevelt."

He indeed avoided no task but lived every day as though it were his last. Though his health was broken, he would not admit it, but drove his flagging strength to the limit in efforts to speed up the war. He gave the keynote speech in Maine, writing it while on a bed of pain, addressed the Republican State Convention on the very day that Quentin was killed, and when his sorrow almost crushed him earnestly urged the reelection of Mayor Mitchel, and supported, in a great speech at Carnegie Hall, the reelection of Governor Whitman. His last appearance was to deliver an address in honor of a Negro Red Cross unit. On the great day of rejoicingArmistice Day-he was compelled to return to the hospital with the acute pain of inflammatory rheumatism. But he mended sufficiently to spend his day of delight, Christmas, with children and grandchil

dren at Oyster Bay. He spent his last evening with his family and at eleven retired, asking his personal attendant, James Amos, to "put out the light." At four o'clock Amos noticed unnatural breathing, but when he reached his side he was gone. His favorite text was, "And walk humbly with God." This faithful disciple and good soldier did so, and "was not, for God took him," even as he did Enoch of old. Such an end well fitted such a good soldier of Jesus Christ.

The Hon. James M. Beck well said at a memorial service, "We cannot believe that a beneficent God, who in physical nature permits nothing to be wasted, should permit the destruction of such a soul." Only pigmies can stand in the presence of this pure and serviceable soul and declare that death destroyed him. He who died on Calvary and rose on Easter morn so real that sincere souls recognized him was indeed the "first fruits."

This chapter may well close with the words of the comrade-son, Kermit, who wrote for the Metropolitan :

When in a little town in Germany my brother and I got the news of my father's death, there kept running through my head with monotonous insistency Kipling's lines:

"He scarce had need to doff his pride

Or slough the dross of earth,

E'en as he trod that day to God
So walked he from his birth
In simpleness and gentleness and
Honor and clean mirth."

That was my father, to whose comradeship and guidance So many of us look forward in the Happy Hunting Grounds (Metropolitan Magazine, October, 1920).

CHAPTER X

PREACHED AND PRACTICED HIGH IDEALS

"As you know, my whole concern at this time is practically the same concern that Amos and Micah and Isaiah had for Jerusalem nearly three thousand years ago."Theodore Roosevelt.

Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and show my people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins.-Isaiah 58. 1.

"I

AM charged with being a preacher. Well, I suppose I am. I have such a bully pulpit,"

said Mr. Roosevelt, referring, of course, to his great political audiences. He was afraid, however, in claiming to be a preacher, of being counted presumptuous or of seeming to lay claim to a peculiar abundance of an artificial piety which some people believe should characterize the preacher.

Mr. Loeb said to me: "Mr. Roosevelt was essentially a preacher of righteousness. He was a little sensitive, however, about having that title applied to him lest people would think of him more as a talker than a doer."

After declaring to Dr. Iglehart that the Christian ministry was the "highest calling in the world," he said:

I consider it my greatest joy and glory that, occupying a most exalted position in the nation, I am enabled simply