ever, I got in at the death this time
also.

I was fond of walking and climbing. As a lad I used to go to the north
woods, in Maine, both in fall and winter. There I made life friends
of two men, Will Dow and Bill Sewall: I canoed with them, and tramped
through the woods with them, visiting the winter logging camps on
snow-shoes. Afterward they were with me in the West. Will Dow is dead.
Bill Sewall was collector of customs under me, on the Aroostook border.
Except when hunting I never did any mountaineering save for a couple of
conventional trips up the Matterhorn and the Jungfrau on one occasion
when I was in Switzerland.

I never did much with the shotgun, but I practiced a good deal with the
rifle. I had a rifle-range at Sagamore Hill, where I often took friends
to shoot. Once or twice when I was visited by parties of released Boer
prisoners, after the close of the South African War, they and I held
shooting matches together. The best man with both pistol and rifle who
ever shot there was Stewart Edward White. Among the many other good
men was a stanch friend, Baron Speck von Sternberg, afterwards German
Ambassador at Washington during my Presidency. He was a capital shot,
rider, and walker, a devoted and most efficient servant of Germany, who
had fought with distinction in the Franco-German War when barely more
than a boy; he was the hero of the story of "the pig dog" in Archibald
Forbes's volume of reminiscences. It was he who first talked over with
me the raising of a regiment of horse riflemen from among the ranchmen
and cowboys of the plains. When Ambassador, the poor, gallant,
tender-hearted fellow was dying of a slow and painful disease, so that
he could not play with the rest of us, but the agony of his mortal
illness never in the slightest degree interfered with his work.
Among the other men who shot and rode and walked with me was Cecil
Spring-Rice, who has just been appointed British Ambassador to the
United States. He was my groomsman, my best man, when I was married--at
St. George's, Hanover Square, which made me feel as if I were living in
one of Thackeray's novels.

My own experience as regards marksmanship was much the same as my
experience as regards horsemanship. There are men whose eye and hand are
so quick and so sure that they achieve a perfection of marksmanship to
which no practice will enable ordinary men to attain. There are other
men who cannot learn to shoot with any accuracy at all. In