age in a degree
rare in history. He can stand calm and unflinching in the path of a
charging grizzly, and he can confront with equal coolness and
determination the predaceous corporations and money powers of the
country.

He unites the qualities of the man of action with those of the scholar
and writer,--another very rare combination. He unites the instincts
and accomplishments of the best breeding and culture with the broadest
democratic sympathies and affiliations. He is as happy with a
frontiersman like Seth Bullock as with a fellow Harvard man, and Seth
Bullock is happy, too.

He unites great austerity with great good-nature. He unites great
sensibility with great force and will power. He loves solitude, and he
loves to be in the thick of the fight. His love of nature is equaled
only by his love of the ways and marts of men.

He is doubtless the most vital man on the continent, if not on the
planet, to-day. He is many-sided, and every side throbs with his
tremendous life and energy; the pressure is equal all around. His
interests are as keen in natural history as in economics, in
literature as in statecraft, in the young poet as in the old soldier,
in preserving peace as in preparing for war. And he can turn all his
great power into the new channel on the instant. His interest in the
whole of life, and in the whole life of the nation, never flags for a
moment. His activity is tireless. All the relaxation he needs or
craves is a change of work. He is like the farmer's fields, that only
need a rotation of crops. I once heard him say that all he cared
about being President was just "the big work."

During this tour through the West, lasting over two months, he made
nearly three hundred speeches; and yet on his return Mrs. Roosevelt
told me he looked as fresh and unworn as when he left home.

SLEIGHING AMONG THE GEYSERS

We went up into the big geyser region with the big sleighs, each drawn
by four horses. A big snowbank had to be shoveled through for us
before we got to the Golden Gate, two miles above Mammoth Hot Springs.
Beyond that we were at an altitude of about eight thousand feet, on a
fairly level course that led now through woods, and now through open
country, with the snow of a uniform depth of four or five feet, except
as we neared the "formations," where the subterranean warmth kept the
ground bare. The roads had been broken and the snow packed for us by
teams from the fort, otherwise the journey w