"The vice of envy is not only dangerous, but also a mean vice, for it is always a confession of inferiority. It may provoke conduct which will be fruitful of wrong to others; and it must cause misery to the man who feels it. It will not be any the less fruitful of wrong and misery if, as is often the case with evil motives, it adopts some high-sounding alias. The truth is, gentlemen, that each one of us has in him certain passions and instincts which, if they gain the upper hand in his soul, would mean that the wild beast had come uppermost in him. Envy, malice, and hatred are such passions, and they are just as bad if directed against a class or group of men as if directed against an individual." Golden words, well worth remembering. A person who believes in them with all his heart cannot go far wrong in his actions, no matter what his station in life. CHAPTER II NICKNAMED TEDDY--GOES TO HARVARD COLLEGE--MEMBER OF MANY CLUBS--DEATH OF MR. ROOSEVELT--ANECDOTES OF COLLEGE LIFE The instincts of the hunter must have been born in Theodore Roosevelt. His first gun was given to him when he was ten years of age, and for the time being his books and his studies were forgotten, and he devoted his whole time and attention to shooting at a target set up in the garden of the country home and in going out with the older folks after such small game as were to be found in that vicinity. The horses on the place were his pets, and he knew the peculiarities of each as well as did the man who cared for them. Riding and driving came to him as naturally as breathing, and the fact that a steed was mettlesome did not daunt him. "My father often drove four-in-hand," he has said. "I liked very much to go with him, and I liked to drive, too." Theodore Roosevelt's schoolboy days were not far out of the ordinary. He studied hard, and if he failed in a lesson he did his best to make it up the next time. It is well said that there is no royal road to learning, and even a future President must study just as hard as his classmates if he wants to keep up with them. Sometimes he was absent from school on account of sickness, and then it was a sharp struggle to keep from dropping behind. "In those days nobody expected Teddy Roosevelt to amount to a great deal," some one has said. "He was thin, pale, and delicate, and suffered with his eyes. But he pulled through, and when he took to athletics, it was wonderful how he got stronger." By his intimate companions, and indeed by nearly everybody who knew him, he was called Teddy, and this nickname clung to him when he went forth into the great world to become a governor and a president. How the nickname came first into use is not known. Since those schoolboy days Mr. Roosevelt has been asked this question:-- "What did you expect to be, or dream of being, when you were a boy?"