and brought me my mail, with your letter in it. I am writing
on the ground; so my naturally good handwriting will not
show to its usual advantage.

I have been three weeks on the round-up and have worked as
hard as any of the cowboys; but I have enjoyed it greatly.
Yesterday I was eighteen hours in the saddle--from 4 A.M. to
10 P.M.--having a half-hour each for dinner and tea. I can
now do cowboy work pretty well.

Toronto[18] must be a dandy; I wish I could pick up one as
good. That is, if he is gentle. You are all off about my
horsemanship; as you would say if you saw me now. Almost all
of our horses on the ranch being young, I had to include in
my string three that were but partially broken; and I have
had some fine circuses with them. One of them had never been
saddled but once before, and he proved vicious, and besides
bucking, kept falling over backwards with me; finally he
caught me, giving me an awful slat, from which my left arm
has by no means recovered. Another bucked me off going down
hill; but I think I have cured him, for I put him through a
desperate course of sprouts when I got on again. The third I
nearly lost in swimming him across a swollen creek, where
the flood had carried down a good deal of drift timber.
However, I got him through all right in the end, after a
regular ducking. Twice one of my old horses turned a
somersault while galloping after cattle; once in a
prairie-dog town, and once while trying to prevent the herd
from stampeding in a storm at night. I tell you, I like
gentle and well-broken horses if I am out for pleasure, and
I do not get on any other, unless, as in this case, from
sheer necessity.

[Footnote 18: Toronto was the name of Lodge's hunter.]

It is too bad that letters cannot be published with stage directions.
For surely the words, "I like gentle and well-broken horses," should
bear about them somewhere the suggestion of the glint of the eye, the
flash of the teeth, the unctuous deliberateness, and the comical
break in the voice with which, surely, Roosevelt whispered them to his
soul before he wrote them down.

While Roosevelt was enjoying adventures and misadventures of various
sorts, Sylvane Ferris was having what he might have described as "a
little party" of his own. For Sylvane, most honest and guileless o