free to devote himself to his children and to those other children of his sympathies, the children of the people. He was the active head of the Children's Aid Society, and for years never missed a Sunday evening at the 18th Street lodging house of that society. His generous activities were widely recognized, and he was made chairman of the State Board of Charities.

Heavy as his sense of duty was and keen as were his sympathies with those in misfortune, Mr. Roosevelt was yet a pleasure-loving man, and his distinguished son has boasted, "My father was the finest man I ever knew, and the happiest." He delighted in the woods; he was fond of sailing his yacht, took part in many athletic sports and drove a four-in-hand with skill in the park.

In politics he was loyal to the principles of his party, but he was as independent of the bosses as his son has shown himself to be. President Hayes honored him for this independence and nominated him to the highest federal office in the state, the collectorship of the port of New York. But the bosses knew that they could not control him and they had the power to cause the Senate to reject his name.

Mr. Roosevelt died in what should have been his prime, but yet not until he had seen his son and namesake, over whom he had watched with so much loving anxiety and upon whom he had looked with the proudest hope, a student at Harvard, and displaying among his fellows a promise of that strength and soundness, alike in body and in character, which he had done his best to give him. As the good man lay dying, the children of the tenements brought him flowers and sent him tear-stained letters, and when he died, the flags of the city were lowered to half-staff in honor of this modest, great-hearted private citizen. "His life," the members of the Union League Club declared in their resolutions, "was a stirring summons to the men of wealth, of culture and of leisure, to a more active participation in public affairs."

This is the summons which Theodore Roosevelt, the younger, has obeyed. The spirit of service was bred in him. He stands the embodiment of his father's devotion to public duty on the one hand, and on the other, of the gallantry of those Confederate uncles, whose daring feats have been his admiration since childhood.

BOYHOOD BATTLES

A youth beset with disadvantages. — The first rich man's son to find a way to leadership in American history. The only city-born boy to reach the Presidency. - A long struggle against ill health. Schooling interrupted. Seeking strength in Europe and at home. - How he won the first and hardest of his battles and fitted himself to play a man's part in life.

THE boyhood of Theodore Roosevelt was beset with disadvantages such as few have had to overcome. It is true that he did not need to toil in the wilderness, as Washington did in his youth, or, like Lincoln, walk many miles to get a book to read. But struggles and privations of that kind are believed to have been the making of many of our foremost men.

Among all the youths born to wealth, Roosevelt alone has gained an important place in the history of our democracy. Shielded and pampered in youth, the average rich boy has no heart for the rude shock of manhood's battles, and learns with despair that there is no royal road to fame. "Theodore Roosevelt, a bright, precocious boy, aged twelve," the

family physician wrote in his "case book," and then remarked to his partner, "he ought to make his mark but for the difficulty that he has a rich father."

Not only have all our foremost men been without rich fathers, but Roosevelt is the first city-born boy to reach the Presidency. All of his twenty-four predecessors were country or village lads, and grew up where life was simple and the paths of duty plain. But a boy born in a big city opens his eyes upon a world that is like a tangled network.

In the primeval wilderness a boy's work is cut out for him. There are trees to be felled, houses to be built, stumps to be pulled, and soil to be turned. In the wilderness of a great city, where the hand must seek its task, the boy too often is lost while trying to find the thing that needs to be done. Thus of all the hundreds of thousands of boys native to New York one may count on his fingers the few who have found the road to fame. The men who achieve most in the city have come from the country, as a rule, and were trained in the country.

Ill health, however, was the first and greatest of all of Roosevelt's disadvantages. "When a boy," he has said, "I was pig-chested and asthmatic."

From earliest infancy he was called to battle with asthma. It lowered his vitality and threatened his growth. This was the longest and hardest of his fights. No encounter of his Rough Rider campaign, no wrestle with the Senate or the trusts or the bosses, has been equal to that conflict in his childhood with the grim enemy of health. But faith and will are his chief support in every contest he enters and they sustained him then. His body was frail, but within was the conquering spirit. He determined to be strong like other boys.

In this he had the loving help of gentle parents. On the wide back porch of their 20th Street home they fitted up a gymnasium, where he strove for bodily vigor with all his might. It is among the fond recollections of his family that although at the start his pole climbing was very poor, he kept trying until he got to the top. He would carry his gymnastic exercises to the perilous verge of the window ledge, more to the alarm of the neighbors than of his own family. "If the Lord hadn't taken care of Theodore," his mother would say, "he would have been killed long ago."

In the Roosevelt home the simple life reigned