When they were little, the Roosevelt boys and girls went to the Cove school, which is the public school of the district, where the children of the gardener and the groom go, as well as those of their employers if they live there in the school season. Now, in Washington, the Roosevelts follow the same plan. The public school first, as far as it will carry the children to advantage, thereafter the further training for college. It is the thoroughly sound and sensible way in which they do all things in the Sagamore Hill family. So only can we get a grip on the real life we all have to live in a democracy of which, when all is said and done, the public school is the main prop. So, and in no other way, can we hold the school to account, and so do we fight from the very start the class spirit that is the arch enemy of the republic. If it could be done that way, I would have it ordered by law that every American child, be its parents rich or poor, should go certain years to public school. Only it cannot be done that way, but must be left to the citizens' common sense that in the end has to be counted with everywhere.

All real children are democrats if left to their

natural bent, and the Roosevelt children are real children. At Groton I met Ted, the oldest, with his arm in a sling, a token from the football game and also from a scrap he had had with another lad who called him "the first boy in the land" and got a good drubbing for it. "I wish," said Ted to me in deep disgust, “that my father would soon be done holding office. I am sick and tired of it."

It was not long after that that Ted fell ill with pneumonia, and his brother Archie sent him his painfully scrawled message of sympathy: "I hop you are beter." His father keeps it, I know, in that sacred place in his heart where lie treasured the memories of letters in childish scrawl that brought home even to the trenches before Santiago, with the shrapnel cracking overhead.

There are other lessons than spelling and grammar to be learned in Washington,-lessons of democracy, too, in their way. I have heard of the policeman of the White House Squad who was discharged for cause, and appealed to the little lad who answers roll-call with the police on holidays and salutes the sergeant as gravely as the men in blue and brass.

Archie heard him out. Appeal to his father direct was cut off-the policeman knew why. But Senator Lodge, who is next friend of the President and is supposed to have a pull," lives in Massachusetts Avenue, opposite Archie's school. That was it.

"You come around," were Archie's directions to his friend, "to the Force School tomorrow, and we will see what Lodge can do about it."

What "Lodge did " I don't know. I know it would have been hard for me to resist.

It was the privilege of Mr. Roosevelt, when he was nearer home, to give the children at the Cove school their Christmas gifts, and the memory of those occasions is very lively in Oyster Bay. Mr. Roosevelt made a good Santa Claus, never better than when he was just home from the war, with San Juan hill for a background. That time he nearly took the boys' breath away. Nowadays some one else has to take his place; the gifts come, as in the past, and the little coves are made happy. But the President comes into their lives only twice or three times a year-at Christmas and when he comes home for his vacation; perhaps on the Fourth of