where a man brought down with his ax forty to fifty giants of the primeval forest in the course of a day's work, here were his heroes in flesh and blood. With all his soul he wanted to be like them. Reluctantly he admitted to himself that that was impossible. It was characteristic of him that he decided that he would be as much like them as he could.

"We hitched up well, somehow or other, from the start," said Bill Sewall, a long time after. "He was fair-minded, Theodore was. And then he took pains to learn everything. There was nothing beneath his notice. I liked him right off. I liked him clear through. There wasn't a quality in him I didn't like. He wasn't headlong or aggressive, except when necessary, and as far as I could see he wasn't a bit cocky, though other folks thought so. I will say, he wasn't remarkably cautious about expressing his opinion."

They "hitched up" well, indeed, for the boy of eighteen and the man of thirty-three were equally clear-eyed in judging men, not by the externals of body and speech, but by the essentials of character and spirit.

"He didn't look for a brilliant man when he found me," said the backwoodsman, many years later. "He valued me for what I was worth."

And a thousand miles away the blue-blooded aristocrat said, "How could I be a snob when I admired him so much?"

Twice a year at least during his college course Theodore Roosevelt explored the woods and waters of Aroostook County with his friend Bill Sewall,

shooting ducks, partridges, and rabbits, but no big game, not even a deer, though once they started a bear and another time followed a caribou that eluded them.

Those journeys in the wilderness, and especially on the waters of Lake Mattawamkeag and in the forests that bordered it, saw the growth of a deep and significant friendship. They talked much of life and politics, finding that they wonderfully agreed in their opinions of what was right and what was wrong. Bill Sewall was a democrat from his heels to his head, and there was one poem which he took a certain unobtrusive pride in repeating to Theodore Roosevelt on their expeditions through the great, quiet woods:

Who are the nobles of the earth,

The true aristocrats,

Who need not bow their heads to kings

Nor doff to lords their hats?

Who are they but the men of toil
Who cleave the forest down
And plant amid the wilderness
The hamlet and the town?
These claim no god of heraldry

And scorn the knighting-rod.
Their coats of arms are noble deeds,
Their peerage is from God.

Theodore Roosevelt had probably heard all that sort of thing before. But he had never heard it from exactly such a source. That made all the difference

in the world.

And so it came about that a backwoodsman in

the heart of Maine taught a New York aristocrat and respected member of Harvard's most exclusive club a lesson in the meaning of democracy.

Four years seem a century on the day a man enters college, and merely a watch in the night on the day he leaves it. Into his own four years Theodore Roosevelt crowded a succession of full and glowing days, clouded for a time by a great grief, when his father, that stanch and inspiring best friend of his, died in his Sophomore year; and lit by a great happiness when, two years later, he became engaged to Alice Lee.

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Those years found him at their beginning a frail boy, intellectually mature, but in many ways a child still. They found him at their close a man in body and mind and spirit, matured by the experience of sorrow and joy, by physical hardship, independent thought, and contact with men of varied interests and divers surroundings. In academic standing he graduated twenty-first in his class; in the affection of his classmates he stood far nearer the top.

Theodore Roosevelt graduated from Harvard in June, 1880. He had every reason to believe that he had before him an active and useful life of hardship and dangers and great endeavors.

A day or two before he left Cambridge he went to his physician for a last physical examination.

The doctor told him that he had heart trouble, that he must choose a profession that would demand no violent exertion, that he must take no vigorous exercise, that he must not even run up-stairs.

It was a stiff blow, but he took it as he had taken other blows. "Doctor," he said, "I am going to do all the things you tell me not to do. If I've got to live the sort of life you have described, I don't care how short it is."

In October he married. The following summer he went abroad and ascended the Matterhorn for no earthly reason except that two Englishmen with whom he was conversing seemed to be under the impression that they were the only ones who had ever ascended it and the only ones who ever would.

And he survived in spite of the pessimistic doctor.

CHAPTER V

HE FINDS HIS PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE WITHOUT QUITE KNOWING IT

"I

PUT myself in the way of things happening, said Theodore Roosevelt, "and they happened." It was with the deliberate intention of having a part in the government of his country that Theodore Roosevelt joined the Twenty-first District Republican Association in the fall of 1880. He did so from no particularly grand passion for public service and with no notion that the country needed saving and that he was the one to save it. He wanted to be "on the team." That was all. It was that old desire of his boyhood, to be of the fellowship of the doers of great deeds. Ward "heelers," he might have said, were not as romantic as vikings, but they were probably in their way quite as effective fighters. The battle between right and wrong, he might have added, is at bottom the same in all ages. Merely the clothes and the weapons change. Joe Murray, of the Twenty-first, might have had some difficulty fighting in King Olaf's chain armor. King Olaf, on the other hand, would never have been able to swing the nominating convention for Theodore Roosevelt

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