splendor of out-of-doors for a human dwelling-place.

Joyce KILMER

A few days after the celebration in Dickinson. Roosevelt went East.
The political sirens were calling. He was restless for something to do
that would bring into service the giant's strength of which he was
becoming increasingly conscious, and, incidentally, would give him an
opportunity to win distinction. He had been half inclined to accept an
offer from Mayor Grace of New York to head the Board of Health, but
Lodge, as Roosevelt wrote to his sister Corinne, thought it "_infra
dig_," and he reluctantly rejected it. There were rumors in the air
that he might have the Republican nomination for Mayor of New York if
he wanted it. He went East, possibly for the purpose of investigating
them, returning to Elkhorn early in August.

Roosevelt was unquestionably restless. He loved the wild country, but
he had tasted all the various joys and hardships it had to offer, and,
although he said again and again that if he had no ties of affection
and of business to bind him to the East, he would make Dakota his
permanent residence, down in his heart he was hungering for a wider
field of action. The frontier had been a challenge to his manhood;
now that he had stood every test it had presented to him, its glamour
faded and he looked about for a sharper challenge and more exacting
labors.

For a few weeks that August he half hoped that he might find them on
the field of battle. Several American citizens, among them a man named
Cutting, had been arrested in Mexico, apparently illegally, and
Bayard, who was President Cleveland's Secretary of State, had been
forced more than once to make vigorous protests. Relations became
strained. The anti-Mexican feeling on the border spread over the whole
of Texas, regiments were organized, and the whole unsettled region
between the Missouri and the Rockies, which was inclined to look upon
Mexico as the natural next morsel in the fulfillment of the nation's
"manifest destiny," began to dream of war.

Roosevelt, seeing how matters were tending, set about to organize a
troop of cavalry in the Bad Lands. He notified the Secretary of War
that it stood at the service of the Government.

I have written to Secretary Endicott [Roosevelt wrote to
Lodge on August 10th], offering to try to raise some
companies of horse-riflemen out here, in the event of
trouble with Mexico. Won