Catching and keeping specimens for this museum gave him more fun than it gave to some of his family.  His mother was not well pleased when she found some young white mice in the ice-chest, where the founder of the “Roosevelt Museum” was keeping them safe.  She quickly threw them away, and her son, in his indignation, said that what hurt him about it was “the loss to Science!  The loss to Science!” Once, he and his cousin had been out in the country, collecting specimens until all their pockets were full.  Then two toads came along,—­such novel and attractive toads that room had to be made for them.  Each boy put one toad under his hat, and started down the road.  But a lady, a neighbor, met them, and when the boys took off their hats, the toads did what any sensible toads would do, hopped down and away, and so were never added to the Museum.

The Roosevelt family visited Europe again in 1873, and afterwards went to Algiers and Egypt, where the air, it was hoped, would help the boy’s asthma.  This was a pleasanter trip for him, and the birds which he saw on the Nile interested him greatly.

His studies of natural history had been carried on in the summers at Oyster Bay on Long Island, on the Hudson and in the Adirondacks.  They soon became more than a boy’s fun, and some of the observations made when he was fifteen, sixteen or seventeen years old have found their way into learned books.  When the State of New York published, many years afterwards, two big volumes about the birds of the state, some of these early writings by Roosevelt were quoted as important.  A friend has given me a four-page folder printed in 1877, about the summer birds of the Adirondacks “by Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., and H. D. Minot.”  Part of the observations were made in 1874 when he was sixteen.  Ninety-seven different birds are listed.

When he was fifteen and had returned a second time from Europe, he began to study to enter Harvard.  He was ahead of most boys of his age in science, history and geography and knew something of German and French.  But he was weak in Latin, Greek and mathematics.  He loved the out-of-doors side of natural history, and hoped he might be a scientist like Audubon.

CHAPTER II

IN COLLEGE

Roosevelt entered the Freshman class of Harvard University in 1876.  It is worth while to remember that this man who became as much of a Westerner as an Easterner, who was understood and trusted by the people of the Western States, was born on the Atlantic coast and educated at a New England college.

The real American, if he was born in the East, does not talk with contempt about the West; if he is a Westerner he does not pretend that all the good in the world is on his side of the Mississippi.  Nor, wherever he came from, does he try to keep up old quarrels between North and South.  Theodore Roosevelt was an American, and admired by Americans everywhere.  Foolish folk who talk about the “effete East,” meaning that the East is worn out and corrupt, had best remember that Abraham Lincoln did not believe that when he sent his son to the same college which Theodore Roosevelt’s father chose for him.