President and his party came to a stone quarry which jutted out into the river and cut off the path. There was a boat at hand, to enable persons to get around the obstruction. Two of his companions jumped into it and motioned the President to a seat. "Meet me on the other side," was his reply, and, followed only by his son, Theodore, Jr., he crept across the blasted face of the rock, holding on by sticking his toes into the little clefts and clutching at others with his hands.

One day, at the close of his office labors, he will be carried off to Maryland in an automobile, for the sake of walking back a dozen miles or so, not reaching home till 9.30. The next day will find him in his saddle for a twenty-mile course. As soon as he became President he asked a friend to find him two good riding horses for the White House stables. This gentleman felt the responsibility of his commission, and he took care that the President should not come to harm through horses selected by him. When the purchases were brought up for approval, the first horse stepped about gently and gracefully, as if to music in a parade. He wouldn't do at all. The second animal had a mincing tread, but the

President did contrive to goad him into a gallop. When, however, he was driven up to a three-foot hurdle, he stopped and sniffed at it with mild curiosity. His rider had seen enough, and, with a sigh of disappointment, he jumped off and threw the bridle to the groom.

"Well, sir?" the groom said inquiringly.

"Oh, for goodness' sake, send them back. I ordered horses, not rabbits."

In the end he got what he wished, horses that combined spirit with gentleness, horses equal to long swings into the country, under the no longer light load of their master, and capable of taking a five-barred fence, as one of them is seen to be doing in a familiar picture of the President.

There is hardly an end to the variety of President Roosevelt's athletic activities. He has built a good clay court back of the executive offices and often plays as many as seven sets at tennis with some member of the little group of congenial friends, who have been widely celebrated as "the tennis Cabinet." He is always ready for a bout with the swords, and early in his administration he took lessons in the famous Japanese exercise, Jiu Jitsu. Its useful

ness so impressed him that he caused it to be added to the athletic training at the Annapolis and West Point academies.

The strenuous life, however, is not all action, by Few cloistered scholars read more any means. than the President. He rests with a book in his hand. While waiting for an important conference he was found holding an Italian text of Dante's "Inferno" in one hand, and John A. Carlyle's prose translation in the other. He loafs with Plutarch, some of whose books he is said to have read a thousand times.

A list of only a part of his reading for two years of his Presidency is bewildering in length and range, including such a wide sweep of literature as represented by Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Aristotle, the "History of Greece," the "Life of Alexander the Great," Mahaffy's "Study of the Greek World," Maspero on the early Syrian, Chaldean and Egyptian civilizations, Froissart, Marbot's "Memoirs," Bain's "Charles XII," Macaulay, Gibbon, Motley, Carlyle, Bacon, Shakespeare, Drayton's Poems, Dante, Molière, Beaumarchais, Oliver Wendell Holmes,