Theodore Roosevelt | Page 8

a nightmare dreaming that the
devil was carrying me away and had collorer morbos (a sickness that is
not very dangerous) but Mama patted me with her delicate fingers."
Little Conie also kept a diary: the next entry is from it:
Paris. "I am so glad Mama has let me stay in the butiful hotel parlor
while the poor boys have been dragged off to the orful picture galary."

Now Theodore again:
Paris, November 26. "I stayed in the house all day, varying the day with
brushing my hair, washing my hands and thinking in fact haveing a
verry dull time."
"Nov. 27. I Did the same thing as yesterday."
Chamounix. "I found several specimens to keep and we went on the
great glacier called 'Mother of ice!'"
"We went to our cousins school at Waterloo. We had a nice time but
met Jeff Davises son and some sharp words ensued."
Venice. "We saw a palace of the doges. It looks like a palace you could
be comfortable and snug in (which is not usual)--We went to another
church in which Conie jumped over tombstones spanked me banged
Ellies head &c."
"Conie" was his nickname for his younger sister Corinne.*
* She subsequently married Mr. Douglas Robinson.
November 22. "In the evening Mama showed me the portrait of Eidieth
Carow and her face stirred up in me homesickness and longings for the
past which will come again never aback never."
The little girl, the sight of whose portrait stirred such longings for the
past in the heart of the young Theodore, was Edith Carow, the special
playmate of his sister Conie and one of the intimate group whom he
had always known. Years later she became his wife.
The Roosevelt family returned to New York in May, 1870, and
resumed its ordinary life. Theodore, whom one of his fellow travelers
on the steamer remembers as "a tall thin lad with bright eyes and legs
like pipestems," developed rapidly in mind, but the asthma still
tormented him and threatened to make a permanent invalid of him. His
father fitted up in the house in Twentieth Street a small gymnasium and

said to the boy in substance, "You have brains, but you have a sickly
body. In order to make your brains bring you what they ought, you
must build up your body; it depends upon you." The boy felt both the
obligation and the desire; he willed to be strong, and he went through
his gymnastic exercises with religious precision. What he read in his
books about knights and paladins and heroes had always greatly moved
his imagination. He wanted to be like them. He understood that the one
indispensable attribute common to all of them was bodily strength.
Therefore he would be strong. Through all his suffering he was patient
and determined. But I recall no other boy, enfeebled by a chronic and
often distressing disease, who resolved as he did to conquer his enemy
by a wisely planned and unceasing course of exercises.
Improvement came slowly. Many were the nights in which he spent
hours gasping for breath. Sometimes on summer nights his father
would wrap him up and take him on a long drive through the darkness
in search of fresh air. But no matter how hard the pinch, the boy never
complained, and when ever there was a respite his vivacity burst forth
as fresh as ever. He could not attend school with other boys and, indeed,
his realization that he could not meet them on equal physical terms
made him timid when he was thrown with them. So he pursued his own
tastes with all the more zeal. He read many books, some of which
seemed beyond a boy's ken, but he got something from each of them.
His power of concentration already surprised his family. If he was
absorbed in a chapter, nothing which went on outside of him, either
noise or interruption, could distract his attention. His passion for
natural his tory increased. At the age of ten, he opened in one of the
rooms of his home "The Roosevelt Museum of Natural History." Later,
he devoted himself more particularly to birds, and learned from a
taxidermist how to skin and stuff his specimens.
In 1873, President Grant appointed Mr. Roosevelt a Commissioner to
the Vienna Exposition and the Roosevelt family made another foreign
tour. Hoping to benefit Theodore's asthma they went to Algiers, and up
the Nile, where he was much more interested in the flocks of aquatic
fowl than in the half-buried temples of Dendera or the obelisks and
pylons of Karnak. He even makes no mention of the Pyramids, but

records with enthusiasm that he found at Cairo a book by an English
clergyman, whose name he forgot, on the ornithology of the Nile,