Letters to His Children | Page 2

well as my own treat me as a friend and
playmate. It has its comic side. They were all bent upon having me take
them; they obviously felt that my presence was needed to give zest to
the entertainment. I do not think that one of them saw anything
incongruous in the President's getting as bedaubed with mud as they
got, or in my wiggling and clambering around jutting rocks, through
cracks, and up what were really small cliff faces, just like the rest of
them; and whenever any one of them beat me at any point, he felt and
expressed simple and whole-hearted delight, exactly as if it had been a
triumph over a rival of his own age."
When the time came that he was no longer the children's chosen
playmate, he recognized the fact with a twinge of sadness. Writing in
January, 1905, to his daughter Ethel, who was at Sagamore Hill at the
time, he said of a party of boys that Quentin had at the White House:
"They played hard, and it made me realize how old I had grown and
how very busy I had been the last few years to find that they had grown
so that I was not needed in the play. Do you recollect how we all of us
used to play hide and go seek in the White House, and have obstacle
races down the hall when you brought in your friends?"
Deep and abiding love of children, of family and home, that was the
dominating passion of his life. With that went love for friends and
fellow men, and for all living things, birds, animals, trees, flowers, and
nature in all its moods and aspects. But love of children and family and
home was above all. The children always had an old- fashioned
Christmas in the White House. In several letters in these pages,
descriptions of these festivals will be found. In closing one of them the
eternal child's heart in the man cries out: "I wonder whether there ever
can come in life a thrill of greater exaltation and rapture than that which
comes to one between the ages of say six and fourteen, when the library

door is thrown open and you walk in to see all the gifts, like a
materialized fairy land, arrayed on your special table?"
His love for the home he had built and in which his beloved children
had been born, was not even dimmed by his life in the White House.
"After all," he wrote to Ethel in June, 1906, "fond as I am of the White
House and much though I have appreciated these years in it, there isn't
any place in the world like home--like Sagamore Hill where things are
our own, with their own associations, and where it is real country."
Through all his letters runs his inexhaustible vein of delicious humor.
All the quaint sayings of Quentin, that quaintest of small boys; all the
antics of the household cats and dogs; all the comic aspects of the
guinea-pigs and others of the large menagerie of pets that the children
were always collecting; all the tricks and feats of the
saddle-horses--these, together with every item of household news that
would amuse and cheer and keep alive the love of home in the heart of
the absent boys, was set forth in letters which in gayety of spirit and
charm of manner have few equals in literature and no superiors. No
matter how great the pressure of public duties, or how severe the strain
that the trials and burdens of office placed upon the nerves and spirits
of the President of a great nation, this devoted father and whole-hearted
companion found time to send every week a long letter of this
delightful character to each of his absent children.
As the boys advanced toward manhood the letters, still on the basis of
equality, contain much wise suggestion and occasional admonition, the
latter always administered in a loving spirit accompanied by apology
for writing in a "preaching" vein. The playmate of childhood became
the sympathetic and keenly interested companion in all athletic contests,
in the reading of books and the consideration of authors, and in the
discussion of politics and public affairs. Many of these letters, notably
those on the relative merits of civil and military careers, and the proper
proportions of sport and study, are valuable guides for youth in all
ranks of life. The strong, vigorous, exalted character of the writer
stands revealed in these as in all the other letters, as well as the cheerful
soul of the man which remained throughout his life as pure and gentle

as the soul of a child. Only a short time before he died, he said to me,
as we were