I received your letter yesterday. Your letter was more exciting than Mother’s. I have a request to ask of you, will you do it? I hope you will, if you will it will figure greatly in my museum. You know what supple jacks are, do you not? Please get one for Ellie and two for me. Ask your friend to let you cut off the tiger-cat’s tail, and get some long moos and have it mated together. One of the supple jacks (I am talking of mine now) must be about as thick as your thumb and finger. The other must be as thick as your thumb. The one which is as thick as your finger and thumb must be four feet long and the other must be three feet long. One of my mice got crushed. It was the mouse I liked best though it was a common mouse. Its name was Brownie. Nothing particular has happened since you went away for I cannot go out in the country like you can. The trees and the vine on our piazza are buding and the grass is green as can be, and no one would dream that it was winter so short a time ago. All send love to all of you. Yours lovingly, THEODORE ROOSEVELT. The “excitement” referred to in the first letter was the wonderful reception accorded to my mother on her return to the city of her girlhood days. Her rooms in the hotel in Savannah were filled by her friends with flowers--and how she loved flowers--but not the “buggie ones” in which her young naturalist son says he would “revel!” One can see the ardent little bird-lover as he wrote “I jumped with delight when I found you had heard a mocking-bird,” and again when he says “Tell me how many curiosities and living things you have got for me.” Insatiable lover of knowledge as he was, it was difficult indeed for his parents to keep pace with his thirst for “outward and visible signs of the things that be.”