them and brought them in. The Rough Riders didn't make him an honorary
member of their regiment just because he was charming and a faithful
friend, but largely because they were a lot of daredevils and he was
another.

To hear him talk you wouldn't have thought that he had ever done a brave
thing in his life. He talked a great deal, and he talked even better
than he wrote (at his best he wrote like an angel), but I have dusted
every corner of my memory and cannot recall any story of his in which he
played a heroic or successful part. Always he was running at top speed,
or hiding behind a tree, or lying face down in a foot of water (for
hours!) so as not to be seen. Always he was getting the worst of it. But
about the other fellows he told the whole truth with lightning flashes
of wit and character building and admiration or contempt. Until the
invention of moving pictures the world had nothing in the least like his
talk. His eye had photographed, his mind had developed and prepared the
slides, his words sent the light through them, and lo and behold, they
were reproduced on the screen of your own mind, exact in drawing and
color. With the written word or the spoken word he was the greatest
recorder and reporter of things that he had seen of any man, perhaps,
that ever lived. The history of the last thirty years, its manners
and customs and its leading events and inventions, cannot be written
truthfully without reference to the records which he has left, to
his special articles and to his letters. Read over again the Queen's
Jubilee, the Czar's Coronation, the March of the Germans through
Brussels, and see for yourself if I speak too zealously, even for a
friend, to whom, now that R. H. D. is dead, the world can never be the
same again.

But I did not set out to estimate his genius. That matter will come in
due time before the unerring tribunal of posterity.

One secret of Mr. Roosevelt's hold upon those who come into contact
with him is his energy. Retaining enough for his own use (he uses a
good deal, because every day he does the work of five or six men), he
distributes the inexhaustible remainder among those who most need it.
Men go to him tired and discouraged, he sends them away glad to be
alive, still gladder that he is alive, and ready to fight the devil
himself in a good cause. Upon his friends R. H. D. had the same effect.
And it was not only in proximity that he could distribute energy, but
from afar, by l