the play. Do you recollect how we all of us used to
play hide and go seek in the White House, and have obstacle races down
the hall when you brought in your friends?"

Deep and abiding love of children, of family and home, that was the
dominating passion of his life. With that went love for friends and
fellow men, and for all living things, birds, animals, trees, flowers,
and nature in all its moods and aspects. But love of children and
family and home was above all. The children always had an old-fashioned
Christmas in the White House. In several letters in these pages,
descriptions of these festivals will be found. In closing one of them
the eternal child's heart in the man cries out: "I wonder whether there
ever can come in life a thrill of greater exaltation and rapture than
that which comes to one between the ages of say six and fourteen, when
the library door is thrown open and you walk in to see all the gifts,
like a materialized fairy land, arrayed on your special table?"

His love for the home he had built and in which his beloved children had
been born, was not even dimmed by his life in the White House. "After
all," he wrote to Ethel in June, 1906, "fond as I am of the White House
and much though I have appreciated these years in it, there isn't any
place in the world like home--like Sagamore Hill where things are our
own, with their own associations, and where it is real country."

Through all his letters runs his inexhaustible vein of delicious humor.
All the quaint sayings of Quentin, that quaintest of small boys; all
the antics of the household cats and dogs; all the comic aspects of the
guinea-pigs and others of the large menagerie of pets that the
children were always collecting; all the tricks and feats of the
saddle-horses--these, together with every item of household news that
would amuse and cheer and keep alive the love of home in the heart of
the absent boys, was set forth in letters which in gayety of spirit
and charm of manner have few equals in literature and no superiors. No
matter how great the pressure of public duties, or how severe the strain
that the trials and burdens of office placed upon the nerves and
spirits of the President of a great nation, this devoted father and
whole-hearted companion found time to send every week a long letter of
this delightful character to each of his absent children.

As the boys advanced toward manhood the letters, still on the basis of
equality, contai