My own darling, sweet, little treasure of a Pussie: Oh! I have so longed for you at times during the last few days. Darling one, you can hardly know what an inestimable blessing to a fellow it is to have such a home as I have. Even now that our dear father has been taken away, it is such a great pleasure to look forward to a visit home; and indeed, he has only ‘gone before,’ and oh! what living and loving memories he has left behind him. I can _feel_ his presence sometimes when I am sitting alone in the evening; I have not felt nearly as sad as I expected to feel, although, of course, there are every now and then very bitter moments. I am going to bring home some of his sweet letters to show you. I shall always keep them, if merely as talismans against evil. Kiss little mother for me, and my love to Aunt Susie and Uncle Hill. [My mother and I were staying in Philadelphia with my aunt Mrs. West.] Tell the latter, Uncle Hill, I am looking forward to spending a month of nude happiness with him next summer among the wilds of Oyster Bay. YOUR LOVING TEDDY. When my brother speaks of keeping my father’s letters to him as “talismans against evil,” he not only expressed the feeling of desire to keep near him always the actual letters written by my father, but far more the spirit with which these letters are permeated. Years afterward, when the college boy of 1878 was entering upon his duties as President of the United States, he told me frequently that he never took any serious step or made any vital decision for his country without thinking first what position his father would have taken on the question. The day that he moved into the White House happened to be September 22, the day of my father’s birth, and dining with him that night in the White House for the first time, we all mentioned this fact and felt that it was a good omen for the future, and my brother said that every time he dated a letter that day he felt with a glow of tender memory the realization that it was his father’s birthday, and that his father’s blessing seemed specially to follow him on that first day when he made his home in the beautiful old white mansion which stands in the heart of America for all that America means to her sons and daughters.