l be much together before they can
be real comrades. Theodore Roosevelt and Joel Chandler Harris knew one
another by reputation only until the red letter day when Uncle Remus
entered the door of the White House, in response to an urgent letter of
invitation in which the President wrote: "Presidents may come and
presidents may go, but Uncle Remus stays put. Georgia has done a great
many things for the Union, but she has never done more than when she
gave Joel Chandler Harris to American literature." When the two
animal-lovers finally came together there was real comradeship. That the
reporters understood this was evident from the wire one of them sent to
his paper: "Midnight--Mr. Harris has not returned to his hotel. The
White House is ablaze with light. It is said that Mr. Harris is telling
the story of Br'er Rabbit and the Tar Baby." But the Georgian's own
colloquial account of the memorable session with his comrade at
Washington was more explicit:

"There are things about the White House that'll astonish you ef ever you
git there while Teddy is on hand. It's a home; it'll come over you like
a sweet dream the minnit you git in the door.... It's a kind of feelin'
that you kin have in your own house, if you've lived right, but it's the
rarest thing in the world that you kin find it in anybody else's
house.... We mostly talked of little children an' all the pranks they're
up to from mornin' till night, an' how they draw old folks into all
sorts of traps, and make 'em play tricks on themselves. That's the
kinder talk I like, an' I could set up long past my bedtime an' listen
to it. Jest at the right time, the President would chip in wi' some of
his adventures wi' the children.... I felt just like I had been on a
visit to some old friend that I hadn't seen in years."

When Robert Louis Stevenson and Edward Livingston Trudeau spent days
together at Dr. Trudeau's Adirondack sanitarium--the one as patient, the
other as physician--they proved that true comradeship is possible even
when men's tastes are most unlike. It was possible because they knew how
to ignore differences and to find common ground in the worth-while
things. "My life interests were bound up in the study of facts, and in
the laboratory I bowed duly to the majesty of fact, wherever it might
lead," Dr. Trudeau wrote. "Mr. Stevenson's view was to ignore or avoid
as much as possible unpleasant facts, and live in a beautiful,
extraneous and ideal world of fancy. I