One can well imagine the excitement of the children around the breakfast-table at the romantic meeting suggested by the anonymous letter. And so, on the following Thursday, the two sisters went in to New York and walked up the Mall in Central Park, and there, standing under the third tree to the left, was the young man--a thin, haggard-looking young man compared to the round-faced boy with whom they had parted so long ago, but eagerly waiting to get from them the last news of the mother who had hoped she would die before any harm could befall him. He had worked his way over in the steerage of a sailing-vessel under an assumed name, for he was afraid of bringing some trouble on my father, and had taken the method of the anonymous letter to bring to him the sisters he had loved and missed so sorely. What a meeting it must have been under that “third tree to the left” of the old Mall of Central Park, and what reminiscences of happier childhood days those three must have indulged in in the brief hour which the brother could give his sisters before sailing back across the broad ocean, for he did not dare meet them again for fear of some unpleasant results for the Northern brother-in-law, for whom he had great admiration. Later, of course, my uncles were given the right to return to their own country, but although they often visited us, they never settled in America again, having rooted their business interests on English soil, though their hearts always turned loyally to the country of their birth. In taking into consideration the immediate forebears of my brother, Theodore Roosevelt, I would once more repeat that to arrive at a true comprehension of his many-sided character one must realize the combination of personalities and the different strains of blood in those personalities from whom he was descended in summing up the man he was. The stability and wisdom of the old Dutch blood, the gaiety and abandon of the Irish strain that came through the female side of his father’s people, and on his mother’s side the great loyalty of the Scotch and the fiery self-devotion of the French Huguenot martyrs, mixed as it was with the light touch which shows in French blood of whatever strain--all this combined to make of the boy born of so varied an ancestry one who was akin to all human nature. In April, 1868, the little boy of nine and a half shows himself, indeed, as father to the man in several characteristic letters which I insert here. They were written to his mother and father and the little sister Conie when the above members of the family were paying a visit to Savannah, and are as follows: New York April 28th, 1868. MY DEAR MAMMA