Theodore Roosevelt | Page 9

was one of these ex-
newsboys who had been sent from New York out West by Mr. Brace
and my father. My father was greatly interested in the societies to
prevent cruelty to children and cruelty to animals. On Sundays he had a
mission class. On his way to it he used to drop us children at our
Sunday-school in Dr. Adams's Presbyterian Church on Madison Square;
I remember hearing my aunt, my mother's sister, saying that when he
walked along with us children he always reminded her of Greatheart in
Bunyan. Under the spur of his example I taught a mission class myself
for three years before going to college and for all four years that I was
in college. I do not think I made much of a success of it. But the other
day on getting out of a taxi in New York the chauffeur spoke to me and
told me that he was one of my old Sunday-school pupils. I remembered
him well, and was much pleased to find that he was an ardent Bull
Mooser!
My mother, Martha Bulloch, was a sweet, gracious, beautiful Southern
woman, a delightful companion and beloved by everybody. She was
entirely "unreconstructed" to the day of her death. Her mother, my
grandmother, one of the dearest of old ladies, lived with us, and was
distinctly overindulgent to us children, being quite unable to harden her
heart towards us even when the occasion demanded it. Towards the
close of the Civil War, although a very small boy, I grew to have a
partial but alert understanding of the fact that the family were not one
in their views about that conflict, my father being a strong Lincoln
Republican; and once, when I felt that I had been wronged by maternal
discipline during the day, I attempted a partial vengeance by praying

with loud fervor for the success of the Union arms, when we all came
to say our prayers before my mother in the evening. She was not only a
most devoted mother, but was also blessed with a strong sense of
humor, and she was too much amused to punish me; but I was warned
not to repeat the offense, under penalty of my father's being
informed--he being the dispenser of serious punishment. Morning
prayers were with my father. We used to stand at the foot of the stairs,
and when father came down we called out, "I speak for you and the
cubby-hole too!" There were three of us young children, and we used to
sit with father on the sofa while he conducted morning prayers. The
place between father and the arm of the sofa we called the
"cubby-hole." The child who got that place we regarded as especially
favored both in comfort and somehow or other in rank and title. The
two who were left to sit on the much wider expanse of sofa on the other
side of father were outsiders for the time being.
My aunt Anna, my mother's sister, lived with us. She was as devoted to
us children as was my mother herself, and we were equally devoted to
her in return. She taught us our lessons while we were little. She and
my mother used to entertain us by the hour with tales of life on the
Georgia plantations; of hunting fox, deer, and wildcat; of the long-
tailed driving horses, Boone and Crockett, and of the riding horses, one
of which was named Buena Vista in a fit of patriotic exaltation during
the Mexican War; and of the queer goings-on in the Negro quarters.
She knew all the "Br'er Rabbit" stories, and I was brought up on them.
One of my uncles, Robert Roosevelt, was much struck with them, and
took them down from her dictation, publishing them in /Harper's/,
where they fell flat. This was a good many years before a genius arose
who in "Uncle Remus" made the stories immortal.
My mother's two brothers, James Dunwoodie Bulloch and Irvine
Bulloch, came to visit us shortly after the close of the war. Both came
under assumed names, as they were among the Confederates who were
at that time exempted from the amnesty. "Uncle Jimmy" Bulloch was a
dear old retired sea-captain, utterly unable to "get on" in the worldly
sense of that phrase, as valiant and simple and upright a soul as ever
lived, a veritable Colonel Newcome. He was an Admiral in the

Confederate navy, and was the builder of the famous Confederate war
vessel Alabama. My uncle Irvine Bulloch was a midshipman on the
/Alabama/, and fired the last gun discharged from her batteries in the
fight with the /Kearsarge/. Both of these uncles lived in Liverpool after
the war.
My uncle Jimmy Bulloch was forgiving and just in reference