s
guns went off, whether intentionally or involuntarily no one ever knew.
His head struck the corner of the bar as he fell, and he lay senseless.
"When my assailant came to," said Roosevelt, "he went down to the
station and left on a freight." It was eminently characteristic of
Roosevelt that he tried his best to avoid trouble, but that, when he
could not avoid it honorably, he took care to make it "serious trouble"
for the other fellow.

Even after he became President, Roosevelt liked to box, until an
accident, of which for many years only his intimate friends were aware,
convinced him of the unwisdom of the game for a man of his age and
optical disabilities. A young artillery captain, with whom he was boxing
in the White House, cross-countered him on the left eye, and the blow
broke the little blood-vessels. Ever afterward, the sight of that eye
was dim; and, as he said, "if it had been the right eye I should have
been entirely unable to shoot." To "a mighty hunter before the Lord"
like Theodore Roosevelt, such a result would have been a cardinal
calamity.

By the time his experiences in the West were over, Roosevelt's fight
for health had achieved its purpose. Bill Sewall, the woodsman who had
introduced the young Roosevelt to the life of the out-of-doors in Maine,
and who afterward went out West with him to take up the cattle business,
offers this testimony: "He went to Dakota a frail young man, suffering
from asthma and stomach trouble. When he got back into the world again,
he was as husky as almost any man I have ever seen who wasn't dependent
on his arms for his livelihood. He weighed one hundred and fifty pounds,
and was clear bone, muscle, and grit."

This battle won by the force of sheer determination, the young Roosevelt
never ceased fighting. He knew that the man who neglects exercise and
training, no matter how perfect his physical trim, is certain to "go
back." One day many years afterward on Twenty-third Street, on the way
back from an Outlook editorial luncheon, I ran against his shoulder, as
one often will with a companion on crowded city streets, and felt as if
it were a massive oak tree into which I had bumped. Roosevelt the grown
man of hardened physique was certainly a transformation from that "reed
shaken with the wind" of his boyhood days.

When Theodore Roosevelt left Harvard in 1880, he plunged promptly into
a new fight--in the political arena. He had no need to earn his living;
his father