“Michael Murphy, the trainer, many years trainer at Yale, and thereafter at ‘Pennsylvania,’ and also for the New York Athletic Club, whose team in 1895 was triumphant over the great team of the London Athletic Club, was also a member of the party. On the way back in the boat I happened to pass through the cabin, which was entirely empty except for Michael Murphy, who, like the all but wizened-up old man he was, having but about a quarter of a lung, and deaf except to those things which he could not hear, sat huddled in a corner. I went up to Mike and said, ‘What are you doing?’ He answered, ‘I am thinking!’ I replied, ‘Yes, that is evident; but what are you thinking about?’ He then said: ‘Well, Mr. Kirby, I suppose there is no doubt but that I am the greatest trainer of men in the world.’ ‘That certainly is true,’ I said. He went on: ‘Mr. Kirby, you are all wrong; until we went down to Oyster Bay I thought I might be, but now I know I am not.’ ‘But,’ I said, ‘Mike, that is nonsense. What do you mean?’ Then Mike answered, ‘Give me sixty men, every one of whom is a champion, and let that man at Oyster Bay have sixty other men, every one of whom is a dub, and his team would lick mine every time!’ I said, ‘Mike, this is impossible; it could not be,’ and then Mike continued,--showing how that magnetic personality of Mr. Roosevelt’s had taken hold of him, and how truly he, Mike Murphy, understood the psychology of inspiration,--‘Yes, Mr. Kirby, you see it’s this way; that man down there would tell a miler that he could reel off a mile in four minutes, (as you know, no one has run, or ever will run a mile in four minutes) and not only would that man _think_ he could run a mile in four minutes, but, by Gad, he’d go out and _do_ it.’” Perhaps no one has ever more cleverly expressed the extraordinary power of that personality than that wizened old trainer, sunk into despondency because he realized that where men are concerned skill and science are as nothing compared to the genius of leadership.