third floor of the house on East
Twentieth Street in New York where he was born, October 27, 1858, his
father had constructed an outdoor gymnasium, fitted with all the usual
paraphernalia. It was an impressive moment, Roosevelt used to say in
later years, when his father first led him into that gymnasium and said
to him, "Theodore, you have the brains, but brains are of comparatively
little use without the body; you have got to make your body, and it lies
with you to make it. It's dull, hard work, but you can do it." The boy
knew that his father was right; and he set those white, powerful teeth
of his and took up the drudgery of daily, monotonous exercise with bars
and rings and weights. "I can see him now," says his sister, "faithfully
going through various exercises, at different times of the day, to
broaden the chest narrowed by this terrible shortness of breath, to
make the limbs and back strong, and able to bear the weight of what was
coming to him later in life."

All through his boyhood the young Theodore Roosevelt kept up his fight
for strength. He was too delicate to attend school, and was taught by
private tutors. He spent many of his summers, and sometimes some of
the winter months, in the woods of Maine. These outings he thoroughly
enjoyed, but it is certain that the main motive which sent him into the
rough life of the woods to hunt and tramp, to paddle and row and swing
an axe, was the obstinate determination to make himself physically fit.

His fight for bodily power went on through his college course at Harvard
and during the years that he spent in ranch life in the West. He was
always intensely interested in boxing, although he was never of anything
like championship caliber in the ring. His first impulse to learn to
defend himself with his hands had a characteristic birth.

During one of his periodical attacks of asthma he was sent alone to
Moosehead Lake in Maine. On the stagecoach that took him the last stage
of the journey he met two boys of about his own age. They quickly
found, he says, in his "Autobiography", that he was "a foreordained and
predestined victim" for their rough teasing, and they "industriously
proceeded to make life miserable" for their fellow traveler. At last
young Roosevelt could endure their persecutions no loner, and tried to
fight. Great was his discomfiture when he discovered that either of them
alone could handle him "with easy contempt." They hurt him little, but,
what w