My Brother, Theodore RooseveltRobinson, Corinne Roosevelt
History
My Brother, Theodore Roosevelt
Robinson, Corinne Roosevelt
Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858-1919
As my brother was leaving Oyster Bay to set sail on his great
adventure, he wrote me that he would spend one whole day with me,
except for necessary business engagements, to which engagements I took
him in my motor. And so my last memories of the time before he sailed
are, as usual, of his unfailing devotion. On March 26 he writes again
from the steamer: “Your dear little note was handed me as I sailed, and
I loved it. It was so good to see you as I did the day before. Darling
sister, I think of you all the time. I suppose your children told you
of the wild whirl of confusion in which I said ‘Goodbye.’ I was very
much touched by the number of acquaintances who came down to see me
off. Indeed hundreds of them were not even acquaintances. They came in
the shape of clubs, societies, delegations, and even more, by scores of
what might be called real friends.”
All through his various sea trips--these sea trips rather bored him--he
writes as follows: “There are plenty of people with whom it is really
pleasant to talk in English or in those variants of volapuk which with
me pass for French and German.” He encloses me a photograph of Kermit
and himself and Selous, the naturalist, which shows a merry moment on
one of those same sea trips. In May of that year he writes from Juja
Farm, Nairobi:
“Really, I have been so busy that I have had no time to myself, and
even have not been regularly homesick; of course, down at bottom I am
homesick the whole time, but it isn’t able to come to the surface, so
to speak, because when I am not actually hunting, I am lying still
because I am tired out.... This house is as pretty and comfortable as
possible, and my host and hostess are the very kindest of the kind. I
am sitting on a cool verandah with vines growing over the trellises,
having just returned from a morning hunt in which I killed a python
and an impala antelope. Yesterday I killed two antelopes, and the day
before, a rhino and a hippo, and the day before that, Kermit killed a
leopard which charged him viciously after mauling one of the beaters. I
have also killed six lions,--four of them big ones. I am sunburned and
healthy, and look like a burly and rather unkempt ruffian.
“Kermit has really done very well. He is very handy, both cool and
daring, in fact, rather too daring sometimes.
“Darling sister, I think of you continually, and would so love to see
you....”
Later, on his return to the same farm after an extended hunting trip,
he says:
“I have worked very hard writing the articles about this trip, and have
put my heart into them, for this trip has been to me one of absorbing
interest; but of course, I haven’t any idea whether I have written
anything worth reading.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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