Our many-sided President has a side to his nature of which the public has heard but little, and which, in view of his recent criticism of what he calls the nature fakirs, is of especial interest and importance. I refer to his keenness and enthusiasm as a student of animal life, and his extraordinary powers of observation. The charge recently made against him that he is only a sportsman and has only a sportsman's interest in nature is very wide of the mark. Why, I cannot now recall that I have ever met a man with a keener and more comprehensive interest in the wild life about us--an interest that is at once scientific and thoroughly human. And by human I do not mean anything akin to the sentimentalism that sicklies o'er so much of our more recent natural history writing, and that inspires the founding of hospitals for sick cats; but I mean his robust, manly love for all open-air life, and his sympathetic insight into it. When I first read his "Wilderness Hunter," many years ago, I was impressed by his rare combination of the sportsman and the naturalist. When I accompanied him on his trip to the Yellowstone Park in April, 1903, I got a fresh impression of the extent of his natural history knowledge and of his trained powers of observation. Nothing escaped him, from bears to mice, from wild geese to chickadees, from elk to red squirrels; he took it all in, and he took it in as only an alert, vigorous mind can take it in. On that occasion I was able to help him identify only one new bird, as I have related in the foregoing chapter. All the other birds he recognized as quickly as I did.