o not wonder that men march joyously to battle and death to drum and
fife squeaking and rattling The Girl I Left Behind Me. It may be a long
way to Tipperary, but it is longer to the end of the tether that binds
the heart of man to the cradle songs of his nativity. With the cradle
songs of America the name of Stephen Collins Foster "is immortal bound,"
and I would no more dishonor his memory than that of Robert Burns or the
author of The Star-Spangled Banner.

Chapter the Twenty-Second

Theodore Roosevelt--His Problematic Character--He Offers Me an
Appointment--His _Bonhomie_ and Chivalry--Proud of His Rebel Kin

I

It is not an easy nor yet a wholly congenial task to write--truthfully,
intelligently and frankly to write--about Theodore Roosevelt. He
belonged to the category of problematical characters. A born aristocrat,
he at no time took the trouble to pose as a special friend of the
people; a born leader, he led with a rough unsparing hand. He was the
soul of controversy. To one who knew him from his childhood as I did,
always loving him and rarely agreeing with him, it was plain to see how
his most obvious faults commended him to the multitude and made for a
popularity that never quite deserted him.

As poorly as I rate the reign of majorities I prefer it to the one-man
power, either elective or dynastic. The scheme of a third term in the
presidency for General Grant seemed to me a conspiracy though with many
of its leaders I was on terms of affectionate intimacy. I fought and
helped to kill in 1896 the unborn scheme to give Mr. Cleveland a third
term. Inevitably as the movement for the retention of Theodore Roosevelt
beyond the time already fixed began to show itself in 1907, my pen was
primed against it and I wrote variously and voluminously.

There appeared in one of the periodicals for January, 1908, a sketch of
mine which but for a statement issued concurrently from the White House
would have attracted more attention than it did. In this I related how
at Washington just before the War of Sections I had a musical pal--the
niece of a Southern senator--who had studied in Paris, been a protegee
of the Empress Eugenie and become an out-and-out imperialist. Louis
Napoleon was her ideal statesman. She not only hated the North but
accepted as gospel truth all the misleading theories of the South: that
cotton was king; that slavery was a divine institution; that in any
enterprise one Southern