iting of all
sports. R. H. D. hunted men in Cuba. He hunted for wounded men who
were out in front of the trenches and still under fire, and found some
of them and brought them in. The Rough Riders didn't make him an
honorary member of their regiment just because he was charming and a
faithful friend, but largely because they were a lot of daredevils and
he was another.

To hear him talk you wouldn't have thought that he had ever done a
brave thing in his life. He talked a great deal, and he talked even
better than he wrote (at his best he wrote like an angel), but I have
dusted every corner of my memory and cannot recall any story of his in
which he played a heroic or successful part. Always he was running at
top speed, or hiding behind a tree, or lying face down in a foot of
water (for hours!) so as not to be seen. Always he was getting the
worst of it. But about the other fellows he told the whole truth with
lightning flashes of wit and character building and admiration or
contempt. Until the invention of moving pictures the world had nothing
in the least like his talk. His eye had photographed, his mind had
developed and prepared the slides, his words sent the light through
them, and lo and behold, they were reproduced on the screen of your own
mind, exact in drawing and color. With the written word or the spoken
word he was the greatest recorder and reporter of things that he had
seen of any man, perhaps, that ever lived. The history of the last
thirty years, its manners and customs and its leading events and
inventions, cannot be written truthfully without reference to the
records which he has left, to his special articles and to his letters.
Read over again the Queen's Jubilee, the Czar's Coronation, the March
of the Germans through Brussels, and see for yourself if I speak too
zealously, even for a friend, to whom, now that R. H. D. is dead, the
world can never be the same again.

But I did not set out to estimate his genius. That matter will come in
due time before the unerring tribunal of posterity.

One secret of Mr. Roosevelt's hold upon those who come into contact
with him is his energy. Retaining enough for his own use (he uses a
good deal, because every day he does the work of five or six men), he
distributes the inexhaustible remainder among those who most need it.
Men go to him tired and discouraged, he sends them away glad to be
alive, still gladder that he is alive, and ready to fight t