I do not wonder that men march joyously to battle and death to drum and fife squeaking and rattling The Girl I Left Behind Me. It may be a long way to Tipperary, but it is longer to the end of the tether that binds the heart of man to the cradle songs of his nativity. With the cradle songs of America the name of Stephen Collins Foster "is immortal bound," and I would no more dishonor his memory than that of Robert Burns or the author of The Star-Spangled Banner. Chapter the Twenty-Second Theodore Roosevelt--His Problematic Character--He Offers Me an Appointment--His _Bonhomie_ and Chivalry--Proud of His Rebel Kin I It is not an easy nor yet a wholly congenial task to write--truthfully, intelligently and frankly to write--about Theodore Roosevelt. He belonged to the category of problematical characters. A born aristocrat, he at no time took the trouble to pose as a special friend of the people; a born leader, he led with a rough unsparing hand. He was the soul of controversy. To one who knew him from his childhood as I did, always loving him and rarely agreeing with him, it was plain to see how his most obvious faults commended him to the multitude and made for a popularity that never quite deserted him. As poorly as I rate the reign of majorities I prefer it to the one-man power, either elective or dynastic. The scheme of a third term in the presidency for General Grant seemed to me a conspiracy though with many of its leaders I was on terms of affectionate intimacy. I fought and helped to kill in 1896 the unborn scheme to give Mr. Cleveland a third term. Inevitably as the movement for the retention of Theodore Roosevelt beyond the time already fixed began to show itself in 1907, my pen was primed against it and I wrote variously and voluminously. There appeared in one of the periodicals for January, 1908, a sketch of mine which but for a statement issued concurrently from the White House would have attracted more attention than it did. In this I related how at Washington just before the War of Sections I had a musical pal--the niece of a Southern senator--who had studied in Paris, been a protégée of the Empress Eugénie and become an out-and-out imperialist. Louis Napoleon was her ideal statesman. She not only hated the North but accepted as gospel truth all the misleading theories of the South: that cotton was king; that slavery was a divine institution; that in any enterprise one Southern man was a match for six Northern men. On these points we had many contentions. When the break came she went South with her family. The last I saw of her was crossing Long Bridge in a lumbering family carriage waving a tiny Confederate flag.