while I was President of the New York Police Board,
insisted on coming--two of them to die, the other two to return unhurt
after honorable and dangerous service. It seemed to me that almost
every friend I had in every State had some one acquaintance who was
bound to go with the Rough Riders, and for whom I had to make a place.
Thomas Nelson Page, General Fitzhugh Lee, Congressman Odell, of New
York, Senator Morgan; for each of these, and for many others, I
eventually consented to accept some one or two recruits, of course
only after a most rigid examination into their physical capacity, and
after they had shown that they knew how to ride and shoot. I may add
that in no case was I disappointed in the men thus taken.

Harvard being my own college, I had such a swarm of applications from
it that I could not take one in ten. What particularly pleased me, not
only in the Harvard but the Yale and Princeton men, and, indeed, in
these recruits from the older States generally, was that they did not
ask for commissions. With hardly an exception they entered upon their
duties as troopers in the spirit which they held to the end, merely
endeavoring to show that no work could be too hard, too disagreeable,
or too dangerous for them to perform, and neither asking nor receiving
any reward in the way of promotion or consideration. The Harvard
contingent was practically raised by Guy Murchie, of Maine. He saw all
the fighting and did his duty with the utmost gallantry, and then left
the service as he had entered it, a trooper, entirely satisfied to
have done his duty--and no man did it better. So it was with Dudley
Dean, perhaps the best quarterback who ever played on a Harvard
Eleven; and so with Bob Wrenn, a quarterback whose feats rivalled
those of Dean's, and who, in addition, was the champion tennis player
of America, and had, on two different years, saved this championship
from going to an Englishman. So it was with Yale men like Waller, the
high jumper, and Garrison and Girard; and with Princeton men like
Devereux and Channing, the foot-ball players; with Larned, the tennis
player; with Craig Wadsworth, the steeple-chase rider; with Joe
Stevens, the crack polo player; with Hamilton Fish, the ex-captain of
the Columbia crew, and with scores of others whose names are quite as
worthy of mention as any of those I have given. Indeed, they all
sought entry into the ranks of the Rough Riders as eagerly as if it
meant something widely d