Theodore Roosevelt | Page 7

my mind that it was valuable exactly as diamonds are
valuable. I accepted that moujik as a priceless work of art, and it was
not until I was well in middle age that it occurred to me that I was
mistaken.
Now and then we children were taken round to our grandfather's house;
a big house for the New York of those days, on the corner of
Fourteenth Street and Broadway, fronting Union Square. Inside there
was a large hall running up to the roof; there was a tessellated
black-and-white marble floor, and a circular staircase round the sides of
the hall, from the top floor down. We children much admired both the
tessellated floor and the circular staircase. I think we were right about
the latter, but I am not so sure as to the tessellated floor.
The summers we spent in the country, now at one place, now at another.
We children, of course, loved the country beyond anything. We
disliked the city. We were always wildly eager to get to the country
when spring came, and very sad when in the late fall the family moved

back to town. In the country we of course had all kinds of pets--cats,
dogs, rabbits, a coon, and a sorrel Shetland pony named General Grant.
When my younger sister first heard of the real General Grant, by the
way, she was much struck by the coincidence that some one should
have given him the same name as the pony. (Thirty years later my own
children had /their/ pony Grant.) In the country we children ran
barefoot much of the time, and the seasons went by in a round of
uninterrupted and enthralling pleasures--supervising the haying and
harvesting, picking apples, hunting frogs successfully and woodchucks
unsuccessfully, gathering hickory-nuts and chestnuts for sale to patient
parents, building wigwams in the woods, and sometimes playing
Indians in too realistic manner by staining ourselves (and incidentally
our clothes) in liberal fashion with poke-cherry juice. Thanksgiving
was an appreciated festival, but it in no way came up to Christmas.
Christmas was an occasion of literally delirious joy. In the evening we
hung up our stockings--or rather the biggest stockings we could borrow
from the grown-ups--and before dawn we trooped in to open them
while sitting on father's and mother's bed; and the bigger presents were
arranged, those for each child on its own table, in the drawing-room,
the doors to which were thrown open after breakfast. I never knew any
one else have what seemed to me such attractive Christmases, and in
the next generation I tried to reproduce them exactly for my own
children.
My father, Theodore Roosevelt, was the best man I ever knew. He
combined strength and courage with gentleness, tenderness, and great
unselfishness. He would not tolerate in us children selfishness or
cruelty, idleness, cowardice, or untruthfulness. As we grew older he
made us understand that the same standard of clean living was
demanded for the boys as for the girls; that what was wrong in a
woman could not be right in a man. With great love and patience, and
the most understanding sympathy and consideration, he combined
insistence on discipline. He never physically punished me but once, but
he was the only man of whom I was ever really afraid. I do not mean
that it was a wrong fear, for he was entirely just, and we children
adored him. We used to wait in the library in the evening until we
could hear his key rattling in the latch of the front hall, and then rush

out to greet him; and we would troop into his room while he was
dressing, to stay there as long as we were permitted, eagerly examining
anything which came out of his pockets which could be regarded as an
attractive novelty. Every child has fixed in his memory various details
which strike it as of grave importance. The trinkets he used to keep in a
little box on his dressing-table we children always used to speak of as
"treasures." The word, and some of the trinkets themselves, passed on
to the next generation. My own children, when small, used to troop into
my room while I was dressing, and the gradually accumulating trinkets
in the "ditty-box"--the gift of an enlisted man in the navy-- always
excited rapturous joy. On occasions of solemn festivity each child
would receive a trinket for his or her "very own." My children, by the
way, enjoyed one pleasure I do not remember enjoying myself. When I
came back from riding, the child who brought the bootjack would itself
promptly get into the boots, and clump up and down the room with a
delightful feeling of kinship with Jack of the seven-league strides.
The punishing incident I have referred to