And so the year of exile had its joyous memories, but in spite of them never were there happier children than those who arrived home in America in the spring of 1870. Earlier in our lives my father, always thinking of the problem of the fragile health of his two older children, conceived the idea of turning the third room of the second story at 28 East 20th Street into an out-of-doors piazza, a kind of open-air gymnasium, with every imaginable swing and bar and seesaw, and my mother has often told me how he called the boy to him one day--Theodore was now about eleven years of age--and said: “Theodore, you have the mind but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must _make_ your body. It is hard drudgery to make one’s body, but I know you will do it.” The little boy looked up, throwing back his head in a characteristic fashion; then with a flash of those white teeth which later in life became so well known that when he was police commissioner the story ran that any recreant policeman would faint if he suddenly came face to face with a set of _false_ teeth in a shop-window--he said, “_I’ll make my body_.” That was his first important promise to himself and the delicate little boy began his work; and for many years one of my most vivid recollections is seeing him between horizontal bars, widening his chest by regular, monotonous motion--drudgery indeed--but a drudgery which eventuated in his being not only the apostle but the exponent of the strenuous life. What fun we had on that piazza! The first Theodore Roosevelt, like his son, was far ahead of his times, and fresh air was his hobby, and he knew that the children who will cry if they are made to take dull walks on dreary city streets, will romp with dangerous delight ungovernessed and unmaided in an outdoor gymnasium. I use the word “dangerous” advisedly, for one day my lovely and delicate mother had an unforgetable shock on that same piazza. She happened to look out of the window opening on to the piazza and saw two boys--one of whom, needless to say, was Theodore--carefully balancing the seesaw from the high rail which protected the children from the possibility of falling into the back yard, two stories below. Having wearied of the usual play, the aforesaid two boys thought they would add a tinge of excitement to the merriment by balancing the seesaw in such a manner as to have one boy always in the thrilling position of hanging on the farther side of the top rail, with the possibility (unless the equilibrium were kept to perfection) of seesaw, boys, and all descending unexpectedly into the back yard.