CHOOSING A CAREER

October 27, 1880, marriage of Theodore Roosevelt and Miss Alice Hathaway Lee. - A European honeymoon. Setting up a home in New York. Publishes his first work, "The Naval History of the War of 1812." - Death of Theodore Roosevelt, the elder, February 9, 1878, aged 46. The son inspired by his father's memory to seek a life of service. - Gives up early ambition to be a professor of natural history. and enters politics. — Fifth Avenue friends laugh at him for joining political club of his ward. His novel campaign in the "Diamond Back District." - Elected to the Legislature in November, 1881.

Studies law

GRADUATING from Harvard at twenty-one, Theodore Roosevelt went into the world, a fairly robust man, of strong character and high ambition. The choice of a career he left to the future. That he would have a useful one he was fully determined. He had no thought of returning to New York and swelling the ranks of the "unemployed rich."

He acted then in accord with the opinion he expressed in later years when he said: "There is nowhere in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting American, insensible to every duty, bent only on amassing a fortune and

putting his fortune only to the basest uses, whether these uses be to speculate in stocks or to wreck railroads himself, or to allow his son to lead a life of foolish and expensive idleness and gross debauchery, or to purchase some scoundrel and his social position, foreign or native, for his daughter."

Roosevelt's noble father had died, but the memory of his life of duty was a living inspiration to the son. He, too, must find a chance to serve. More than once in the years that have followed, when he has done a thing which he deemed worthy of this example, so constantly before him, he has been heard to exclaim : "How I wish father were here and could see it!"

He had married in the autumn following his graduation a young lady whom he met in his Harvard days, Alice Hathaway Lee, the daughter of a notable Boston family of wealth and culture. After a honeymoon in Europe, where Mr. Roosevelt climbed the Matterhorn on a dare, the young couple went to housekeeping in New York.

There he loyally undertook to carry on his father's work. He became the secretary of the Prison Reform Association and joined in various philanthropic movements with which the elder Theodore Roosevelt

had been associated. But he soon found that Theodore Roosevelt, the younger, was quite another man and that the best way to honor the name was to find his own work and then do it in his own way.

He had not thought of becoming a writer of books. At Harvard, he was one of the editors of the college paper, the Advocate, but did almost no writing for it. The foundation of his first book was laid by chance. He was fond of both civil and military history. It was in the course of his reading along this line that he found a number of manifest errors in the history of the naval battles in the War of 1812. Merely to satisfy himself, he began an investigation of the facts. He diligently sought out every record of the conflict, on the shelves of the Harvard library, until he had gathered sufficient material for a new history of our sea struggles with Great Britain. This he brought out in two volumes the year after leaving college, and "The Naval History of the War of 1812" received praise both in England and America that was flattering to a young author in his twenty-third year.

When he first went to college and on his earlier visits to the wilds of Maine, Mr. Roosevelt's deepest

interest, among all his studies, was in natural history, and he was looking forward to fitting himself to be a professor of that branch of instruction. He had begun by learning the birds and trees and flowers around Oyster Bay, and at Harvard he took more pleasure in natural history than in any other part of his work.

Not only were his college lodgings decorated with birds, which showed his skill in mounting, but his tastes attracted some rather queer living companions of the insect and reptile species. His fellow-lodgers have a lively recollection of the alarm caused in the house once when an enormous tortoise was encountered in the hallway. It had escaped from Roosevelt's rooms and presumably was heading for the bath-room to get a drink of water.

On another occasion his active interest in this direction caused almost a panic in a street car, where some lobsters, which he was taking out from Boston for the purpose of scientific study, escaped from their package and introduced themselves to the passengers. That his devotion to this science continued to the end is shown by his having chosen natural history as the theme of his graduating essay.

But as he gained in physical strength his interests constantly broadened. The love of combat stirred in his blood and he began to think he might like a more aggressive life than that of a teacher. Bill Sewall says he told him to go into politics, and that Roosevelt finally agreed that it would be a good field for him if he could only find something to do in it.

"He who has not wealth owes his first duty to his family," he has since said; "but he who has means owes his time to the state. It is ignoble to go on heaping money on money. I would preach the doctrine of work for all to the men of wealth, the doctrine of unremunerative work." That is the doctrine which he practised long before he preached it.

While he was joining in some amateur political movements among the young men of his acquaintance he took up the study of law, but with no serious purpose to make that his calling. It proved to be a part of his general training for the work which he was to do. He entered the law course at Columbia College, in the city, and at the same time studied in the law office of an uncle. At the lectures he showed

the same earnestness which always marked his attention to any subject that he took up. A member