from his secretary, who at that distance stood guard against the world and the cares of power, while the two nature lovers might say with the banished duke in the forest of Arden:

"And this our life, exempt from public haunt,

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything."

After leaving the Yellowstone, the President visited that other noble park, the Yosemite, and there he slept out in a snow-storm, with not even a tent above him. On his return he stopped in Wyoming and took a seventy-five-mile ride on horseback. He was eight hours in the saddle, and the people at Cheyenne said he arrived there looking fresh enough to go on for another eight hours.

In the interval of two months between his Governorship and his Vice-Presidency, Mr. Roosevelt went cougar hunting in Colorado for four weeks. It was in the very depth of winter, and all the world was buried under ice and snow. He, however, was comfortable in his buckskin shirt and hunting jacket lined with sheepskin, and his cap drawn down over his ears. He was forty miles from the railroad, and

all around in the gloomy gorges or upon the cliffs were elk, blacktail deer, cougar, and mountain sheep. His "veins thrilled and beat with buoyant life.” To him, even the baying of the wolves at night was "rather attractive." They would come down close to the ranch, where he was staying, and howl by the hour, and he would go out in the darkness, with the thermometer standing at twenty below, and for half an hour at a time listen, entranced, to the wild music of the beasts.

One night he entered on a chase by moonlight. He could not see the sights of his rifle. When the steeps were too much for the footing of his horse, he continued the pursuit unmounted, until he had followed the cougar along a cliff fully a hundred feet high. Finally he made his conquest only by hanging over the precipice while a guide held him by the legs.

The President had a month of hunting in the spring of 1905. He first went to Oklahoma, where he joined in wolf coursing over the rolling prairies. It was in the land of prairie-dog villages, where that queer little brute carries on coöperative housekeeping with rattlesnakes and burrowing owls.

The President and his companions would gallop across the countless holes of one of those strange communities, but their sure-footed ponies seldom stumbled. At noon the party would gather about the "chuck wagon," the lunch-cart of the plains, which followed them, and the President, in describing the pleasures of the vacation, exclaimed, "Where does a man take more frank enjoyment in his dinner than at the tail end of a chuck wagon!"

As they rode back to civilization and the railroad on the last day of the hunt, some one proposed that they stir up the town which they were approaching, by making a regular cowboy rush upon it. So, when they were about a mile outside, the President and all of them broke into a lope, and by the time the main street was reached their horses were on a wild run. Thus they tore through the place and bore down upon the railroad station like a whirl

wind.

In the same spring the President enjoyed a bear hunt in Colorado. There he revelled in the freedom of tent life, amid the leafless aspens and great spruces, beside the rushing, ice-rimmed brook. Early to breakfast was the rule, and then off for the hunt,