On one occasion, while hunting on Beaver Creek for a lost horse, he met a cowboy and made friends with him. Caught in a heavy snowstorm, they lost themselves, and after eight or nine horns of drifting, finally came across an empty hut near Sentinel Butte. Making their horses comfortable in a sheltered nook with hay found in an old stack, the two cold and tired men sat down to spend the long winter evening together. Out of Roosevelt’s pocket came a small edition of Hamlet. His cowboy companion was greatly interested in the reading, and Roosevelt tells us that he commented very shrewdly on the parts he liked, especially Polonius’s advice to Laertes. His final comment was extremely gratifying to the man who had introduced to him the treasures of the world’s greatest dramatist, and would doubtless have given great pleasure to the immortal bard himself: “Old Shakespeare saveyed human natur’ some!” On another evening the men at the Roosevelt ranch began to discuss the English soldiers. Thereupon Roosevelt got down “Napier” and read them extracts from his descriptions of the fighting in the Spanish peninsula. He also told them about the fine appearance and splendid horses of the cavalry and hussars he had seen. Thus when the East called Roosevelt home there was left behind in the minds of the sons and daughters of the great West not only the recollection of a tried and true comrade, but also the seeds of a culture whose fruitage is still springing forth from the lives he touched. From a business standpoint Roosevelt’s ranching venture was a failure. The country was poorly adapted to cattle-raising. His reviving interest in politics and his engagement to Edith Carow came to draw him back to the fields where happiness and success waited. Sewall and Dow returned East with him. The duty of a biographer is to record and not to speculate, yet as we look at Roosevelt’s later life in his unpretentious home at Sagamore Hill; when we think of the democratic sewing circle at Oyster Bay to which Mrs. Roosevelt goes regularly to sew garments for crippled children, and when we see the democratic simplicity with which Roosevelt mingled with his neighbors and shared their experiences and confidences; when we read of him or Captain Archie playing Santa Claus to the village children, we are led to pronounce this judgment, which we feel Roosevelt, if he were living, would heartily second--that while he gave to the men and women of the West the best that was in him, he also received from their kind hearts and frank and open natures a deepening and ripening of his sense of brotherhood that was equivalent in value to the finest gifts he gave these frontier folks. V Keeping Fit