The rabbits, those redoubtable foes of race suicide, breed in the grounds, and now and then the President has caught sight of a wandering possum. Gray squirrels are numerous, and some of them have so little fear of "the big stick," that they eat out of his hand. In the hot June days the indigo bird chants through the afternoon, and one June the President, as he sat in the star-lit darkness on the lovely south portico of the White House, often heard two little saw-whet owls snoring softly.

LIFE IN THE WHITE HOUSE

The President's faithful shadows from the Secret Service. Saving the White House and making it a decent habitation. — Mrs. Roosevelt as a housekeeper. Her two kitchens and two dining rooms. How guests are entertained. - The White House under the Roosevelts no petty palace, but a true American home. Mr. Roosevelt refuses to take precedence of ladies. Washington shocked by his freedom from ancient customs. The simple life at Pine Knob, down in old Virginia. - The President at church.

PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT had the courage, at the outset of his administration, to take measures to defend himself from assassins and to make the White House a decent habitation.

Three Presidents had been shot down because they had refused to protect themselves. More than a third of the chief magistrates of the republic in thirty-five years had been assassinated. The chosen chief of a free people for a brief term was in more peril of his life than any hereditary monarch of the Old World.

It was a frightful record, and a shameful one, for America. Our land did not really deserve to out

rank Russia and Turkey as the breeding place of assassins. Our Presidents were murdered because they were the only chiefs of state in the world who were never guarded against the murderous lunatic seeking a shining mark. One protecting hand could have saved Lincoln, Garfield, or McKinley. It was a tradition of the Presidency, however, to have no guard, to "trust the people."

President Roosevelt was not afraid that his countrymen would think him a coward if he took a few simple precautions to prevent a recurrence of the tragedy at Buffalo, which had shocked the world and stained again the history of the Presidency. He stopped the foolish and exhausting custom of wholesale handshaking, which, after all, was only a vulgar affectation of democracy. He took a detail of men from the Bureau of the Secret Service, and two of them have been beside him on all public occasions. They wear no uniforms, and their presence is not noticed by the people. One sits with the driver of any carriage in which the President rides, and when he addresses a meeting, the secret service men are between him and the crowd. If he goes for a horseback ride in Washington, a cavalry ser