," said T. R., "what is it?"

"Well, Colonel," said Jack, "I've always believed that it was your
ambition to die on the field of battle."

T. R. brought his hand down on the table with a crash that must have
hurt the wood.

"By Jove," said he, "how did you know that?"

"Well, Colonel," said Jack, "do you remember that day in Cuba, when you
and I were going along a trail and came upon ____ [one of the regiment]
propped against a tree, shot through the abdomen? It was evident that he
was done for. But instead of commiserating him, you grabbed his hand
and said something like this, 'Well, old man, isn't this splendid!' Ever
since then I've been sure you would be glad to die in battle yourself."

T. R.'s face sobered a little.

"You're right, Jack," he said. "I would."

The end of Theodore Roosevelt's life seemed to come to him not in action
but in quietness. But the truth was other than that. For it, let us turn
again to Browning's lines:

I was ever a fighter, so--one fight more,
The best and the last!
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore,
And bade me creep past.

On the fifth of January in 1919, after sixty years of life, full of
unwearied fighting against evil and injustice and falseness, he "fell on
sleep." The end came peacefully in the night hours at Sagamore Hill.
But until he laid him down that night, the fight he waged had known no
relaxation. Nine months before he had expected death, when a serious
mastoid operation had drained his vital forces. Then his one thought
had been, not for himself, but for his sons to whom had been given the
precious privilege, denied to him, of taking part in their country's
and the world's great fight for righteousness. His sister, Mrs. Corinne
Douglas Robinson, tells how in those shadowy hours he beckoned her to
him and in the frailest of whispers said, "I'm glad it's I that lie here
and that my boys are in the fight over there."

His last, best fight was worthy of all the rest. With voice and pen he
roused the minds and the hearts of his countrymen to their high mission
in defense of human rights. It was not given to him to fall on the field
of battle. But he went down with his face to the forces of evil with
which he had never sought a truce.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The reader who is primarily interested in the career and personality
of Roosevelt would do well to begin with his own volume, "Theodore
Roosevelt, An Autobiography"