The above letter shows how normal a life the young man was leading, how simply and naturally he was responding to the friendly hospitality of his new Boston friends. Boston had welcomed him originally for the sake of his older sister, who, during two charming summer visits to Bar Harbor, Maine, had made many New England friends. The Sunday-school which he mentions, and to which he gave himself very faithfully, proved a big test of character, for it was a great temptation to go with the other fellows on Saturday afternoons to Chestnut Hill or Brookline or Milton, where open house was kept by the Lees, Saltonstalls, Whitneys, and other friends, and it was very hard either to refuse their invitation from the beginning or to leave the merry parties early Sunday morning and return to Cambridge to be at his post to teach the unruly little people of the slums of Cambridge. So deeply, however, had the first Theodore Roosevelt impressed his son with the necessity of giving himself and the attainments with which his superior advantages had endowed him to those less fortunate than he, that all through the first three years of his college life he only failed to appear at his Sunday-school class twice, and then he arranged to have his class taken by a friend. Truly, when _he_ put his hand to the plough he never turned back. On March 27 of his first year at college he writes again in his usual sweet way to his younger sister: “Little Pet Pussie: 95 per cent _will_ help my average. I want to pet you again awfully! You cunning, pretty, little, foolish Puss. My easy chair would just hold myself and Pussie.” Again on April 15: “Little Pussie: Having given Motherling an account of my doings up to yesterday, I have reserved the more frivolous part for little pet Pussie. Yesterday, in the afternoon, Minot Weld drove me over to his house and at six o’clock we sallied forth in festive attire to a matinée ‘German’ at Dorchester which broke up before eleven o’clock. This was quite a swell affair, there being about 100 couples.... I spent last night with the Welds and walked back over here to Forest Hill with Minot in the afternoon, collecting a dozen snakes and salamanders on the way.” Still the natural historian, even although on pleasure bent; so snakes and salamanders hold their own in spite of “swell matinée Germans.” From Forest Hill that same Sunday he writes a more serious letter to his father: “Darling Father: I am spending my Easter vacation with the Minots, who, with their usual kindness, asked me to do so. I did not go home for I knew I should never be able to study there. I have been working pretty steadily, having finished during the last five days, the first book of Horace, the sixth book of Homer, and the ‘Apology of Socrates.’ In the afternoon, some of the boys usually come out to see me and we spend that time in the open air, and on Saturday evening I went to a party, but during the rest of the time I have been working pretty faithfully.