had recently seen
and heard Lincoln's sparrow. We loitered there, reclining upon the dry
grass for an hour or more, waiting for the sparrow, but it did not
appear.

During my visit there we named over seventy-five species of birds and
fowl, he knowing all of them but two, and I knowing all but two. He
taught me Bewick's wren and the prairie warbler, and I taught him the
swamp sparrow and one of the rarer warblers; I think it was the pine
warbler. If he had found the Lincoln sparrow again, he would have been
one ahead of me.

I remember talking politics a little with him while we were waiting for
the birds, and, knowing that he was expecting Taft to be his successor,
I expressed my doubts as to Taft's being able to fill his shoes.

"Oh, yes, he can," he said confidently; "you don't know him as well as I
do."

"Of course not," I admitted; "but my feeling is that, though Taft is an
able and amiable man, he is not a born leader."

(I am glad to say that Mr. Taft's recent course in support of the
proposed League of Nations has quite brought me around to Roosevelt's
estimate of him.)

Pine Knot is a secluded place in the woods. One evening as we sat in the
lamplight, he reading Lord Cromer on Egypt, and I a book on the
man-eating lions of Tsavo, and Mrs. Roosevelt sitting near with her
needlework, suddenly Roosevelt's hand came down on the table with such a
bang that it made us both jump, and Mrs. Roosevelt exclaimed in a
slightly nettled tone, "Why, my dear, what _is_ the matter?"

He had killed a mosquito with a blow that would almost have demolished
an African lion.

It occurred to me later that evening how risky it was for the President
of the United States to be so unprotected--without a guard of any
kind--in that out-of-the-way place, and I expressed something of this to
him, suggesting that some one might "kidnap" him.

"Oh," he answered, slapping his hand on his hip pocket, "I go armed, and
they would have to be mighty quick to get the drop on me."

Shortly after that, to stretch my legs a little and listen to the night
sounds in the Virginia woods, I went out around the cabin and almost
immediately heard some animal run heavily through the woods not far from
the house. I thought perhaps it was a neighboring dog, but, on speaking
of it to Mrs. Roosevelt, was told that two secret service men came every
night at nine o'clock and stood on guard till morning, spending the day
at a farmhouse in that vicinity.