still more vivid impression of his keenness and quickness in all
natural history matters. The one passion of his life seemed natural
history, and the appearance of a new warbler in his woods--new in the
breeding season on Long Island--seemed an event that threw the affairs
of state and of the presidential succession quite into the background.
Indeed, he fairly bubbled over with delight at the thought of his new
birds and at the prospect of showing them to his visitors. He said to
my friend who accompanied me, John Lewis Childs, of Floral Park, a
former State Senator, that he could not talk politics then, he wanted
to talk and to hunt birds. And it was not long before he was as hot
on the trail of that new warbler as he had recently been on the trail
of some of the great trusts. Fancy a President of the United States
stalking rapidly across bushy fields to the woods, eager as a boy and
filled with the one idea of showing to his visitors the black-throated
green warbler! We were presently in the edge of the woods and standing
under a locust tree, where the President had several times seen and
heard his rare visitant. "That's his note now," he said, and we all
three recognized it at the same instant. It came from across a little
valley fifty yards farther in the woods. We were soon standing under
the tree in which the bird was singing, and presently had our glasses
upon him.

[Illustration: THE PRESIDENT'S HOME ON SAGAMORE HILL, SHOWING
ADDITION KNOWN AS THE TROPHY ROOM

From stereograph, copyright 1907, by Underwood & Underwood,
New York]

"There is no mistake about it, Mr. President," we both said; "it is
surely the black-throated green," and he laughed in glee. "I knew it
could be no other; there is no mistaking that song and those markings.
'Trees, trees, murmuring trees!' some one reports him as saying. Now
if we could only find the nest;" but we did not, though it was
doubtless not far off.

Our warblers, both in color and in song, are bewildering even to the
experienced ornithologist, but the President had mastered most of
them. Not long before he had written me from Washington that he had
just come in from walking with Mrs. Roosevelt about the White House
grounds looking up arriving warblers. "Most of the warblers were up in
the tops of the trees, and I could not get a good glimpse of them; but
there was one with chestnut cheeks, with bright yellow behind the
cheeks, and a yellow breast thickl