Theodore Roosevelt, in a vivid speech at Carnegie Hall just before Election day, had defined the issues of the future in sharp, terse sentences, and had pleaded for preparedness for peace (for the signs of those days showed that peace was not far off), as he had pleaded so long ago for preparedness for war. He was far from well on the night when he made that speech, which was to prove the last that he would ever make in the hall in which he had so often aroused his fellow citizens to a sense of their civic and national duty. I was ill and could not be present, but Mrs. Roosevelt told me afterward that she had been much concerned for him, for a trouble which he thought was sciatica in his leg was giving him intense pain. No one would have suspected that fact, however, and many in the audience told me afterward that that speech in Carnegie Hall was one of the most convincing and thrilling appeals to patriotism ever made by Theodore Roosevelt. A few days later, always true to his interest in the colored people, he made an address under the auspices of the Negro Circle, and again I was to have been present and was prevented by my condition of health. The following week when I was better I telegraphed to Oyster Bay to ask him, if possible, to lunch with me in New York, and to my distress received an answer that he was not well enough to come to New York, but would I come out and spend the night at Oyster Bay instead? When I arrived at Sagamore Hill, I could not but feel worried to find him in bed, and in much pain, which, however, he entirely disregarded, and we had one of the most delightful evenings that I ever remember spending with him. I had brought, thinking that it might interest him, Professor William Lyon Phelps’s book on “Modern Poetry,” and during the time that I left his room to take dinner with my sister-in-law, he had read so much and with such avidity that I felt on my return to his bedside that he had assimilated the whole volume. In spite of pain and politics, he threw himself into a discussion of modern American poetry, taking up author after author and giving me rapid criticisms or appreciations. He took much interest in both Edgar Lee Masters and Vachel Lindsay, struck with the masterful story-telling quality of the one and the curious rhythmic metre of the other, and the strong Americanism of both.