More than fifty years have passed since the painstaking penning of the childish letters, but the heart of his sister in reading them thrills hotly at the thought that the little “Conie” of those days was “very much” missed by her idolized brother, and how she treasured the letter written all for her, with the pictures of the cages in which he kept his beloved mice! It was sad that the pictures of the chaffinch, wren, and cat, evidently enclosed for each of the travellers, should have been lost. In the two letters to his father he enlists that comrade-father’s services for his adored “museum” by the plea for “trophies from some battle field,” and the urgent request for the “supple jack,” the nature of which exciting article I confess I do not understand. I do understand, however, his characteristic distress that “one of my mice got crushed. It was the mouse I liked best though it was a common mouse.” That last sentence brought the tears to my eyes. How true to type it was! the “common mouse” was the one he liked best of all--never the rare, exotic thing, but the every-day, the plain, the simple, and he probably liked it so much just because that little “common mouse” had shown courage and vitality and affection! All through Theodore Roosevelt’s life it was to the plain simple things and to the plain simple people that he gave his most loyal devotion. In May, 1869, because of a great desire on the part of my mother to visit her brothers in England, as well as to see the Old World of which she had read and studied so much, she persuaded my father to take the whole family abroad. After those early summers at Madison, which still stand out so clearly in my memory, there comes a less vivid recollection of months passed at the beautiful old place at Barrytown, on the Hudson River, which my parents rented from Mr. John Aspinwall, and where a wonderful rushing brook played a big part in the joys of our holiday months. We “younger ones” longed for another summer at this charming spot and regretted, with a certain amount of suspicion, the decision of the “Olympians” to drag us from our leafy haunts to improve our rebellious young minds, but my parents were firm in their decision, and we started on the old paddle-wheel steamship _Scotia_, as I have said, in May, 1869. In a letter from my mother to my aunt, who had married Mr. James King Gracie, and was therefore regretfully left behind, she described with an easy pen some incidents of the voyage across the ocean, as follows: