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came to wish the President a happy New Year were the Civil Service Commissioners, headed by John R. Procter, his old colleague, all men after his own heart. Mr. Procter still laughed at the recollection of that New Year's greeting when I saw him last.1 The President drew himself up at their approach and remarked with stiff dignity, loud enough for all to hear:

"The moral tone of the room is distinctly lowered."

No one need ever have any fear that Roosevelt will get the country into an undignified position. If unfamiliarity with a situation should lead him off the track, take my word for it he will take the straight, common-sense way out, and get there. The man who in his youth could describe Tammany as a highly organized system of corruption tempered with malevolent charity," and characterize a mutual acquaintance, a man with cold political ambitions whom I deemed devoid of sentiment, as having both, but "keeping them in different com

1 Poor friend! As the printer brings me the proof of this, I hear of his death. There was never a more loyal heart, a more dauntless soul than his. The world is poorer, indeed, for his going from us.

partments," can be trusted to find a way out of any dilemma.

If he got into one, that is to say. I know him well enough to be perfectly easy on that score. It seems to me that all the years I have watched him he has tackled problems that were new and strange to him, with such simple common sense that the difficulties have vanished before you could make them out; and the more difficult the problem the plainer his treatment of it. We were speaking about the Northern Securities suits one day.

"I do not claim to be a financial expert," he said; "but it does not take a financial expert to tell that, the law being that two small men shall not combine to the public injury, if I allow two big men to do it I am setting up that worst of stumbling-blocks in a country like ours, which persuades the poor man that if he has money enough the law will not apply to him. That is elementary and needs no training a financier. So in this matter of publicity of trust accounts. Publicity hurts no honest business, and is not feared by the man of straight methods. The man whose methods are crooked is the man whose game I would

block. Those who complain know this perfectly well, and their complaining betrays them. Again, with honest money—I did not need any financier to tell me that a short-weight dollar is not an honest dollar to pay fullweight dollar debts with."

I thought of the wise newspaper editors who had been at such pains to explain to us how Roosevelt was responsible for the "unsettled condition" of Wall Street. Their house of cards, built up with such toilsome arguing, was just then falling to pieces, and the news columns in their own papers were giving us an inside view of what it was that had been going on in the financial market, and why some securities remained "undigested." Water and wind are notoriously a bad diet; and what else to call the capitalization of a concern at thirty millions that rated itself at five, would puzzle, I imagine, even a "financial expert."

And has he then no faults, this hero of mine? Yes, he has, and I am glad of it, for I want a live man for a friend, not a dead saint—they are the only ones, I notice, who have no faults. He talks, they say, and I hope he will keep on, for he has that to say which the world needs

to hear and cannot hear too long or too often. I don't think that he could keep a scrap-book, if he tried. I am sure he could not. It is not given to man once in a thousand years to make and to record history at the same time. But then it is not his business to keep scrap-books. I know he cannot dance, for I have seen a letter from a lady who reminded him of how he trod strenuously" on her toes in the old dancing-school days when the world was young. And I have heard him sing-that he cannot do. The children think it perfectly lovely, but he would never pass for an artist. And when the recruit in camp accosted him with "Say, are you the Lieutenant-Colonel? The Colonel is looking for you," he did not order him under arrest or jab him with his sword, but merely told him to "Come with me and see how I do it "; which was quite irregular, of course, if it did make a soldier out of a raw recruit. Oh, yes! I suppose he has his faults, though all these years I have been so busy finding out good things in him that were new to me, that I have never had time to look for them. But when I think of him, gentle, loyal, trusting friend, helpful, unselfish ever,