His last year at college was one of equal growth, although the development was not as apparent as in his junior year, and in June, 1880, he graduated with honors, a happy, successful Harvard alumnus. A number of his New York friends went on for class day, and all made merry together, and not long afterwards he and his brother Elliott started on a hunting trip together. Elliott, who as a young child had been the strong one, when Theodore was a delicate little boy, had, during the years of adolescence, been somewhat of an invalid and could not go to college; our father, wise as ever, decided he must have his education in another way, and he arranged for Elliott to spend several years largely in the open air. He became a splendid shot, and my brother Theodore always felt that Elliott was far the better hunter of the two. The brothers were devoted to each other, and were each the complement of the other in character. Theodore writes from Wilcox’s farm, Illinois, August 22, 1880: “Darling Pussie: We have been having a lovely time so far, have shot fair quantities of game, are in good health, though our fare and accommodations are of the roughest. The shooting is great fun; you would laugh to see us start off in a wagon, in our rough, dirty, hunting-suits, not looking very different from our driver; a stub-tailed, melancholy looking pointer under the front seat, and a yellow, fool idea of a setter under the back one, which last is always getting walked on and howling dismally. We enjoy the long drives very much: the roads are smooth and lovely, and the country, a vast undulating prairie, cut up by great fields of corn and wheat with few trees. The birds are not very plentiful, but of great variety; we get prairie chickens in the stubble fields, plover in the pastures, snipe in the ‘slews,’ and ducks in the ponds. We hunt about an hour or two in a place, then get into our wagon and drive on, so that, though we cover a very large tract of country, we are not very tired at the end of the day, only enough to make us sleep well. The climate is simply superb, and though the scenery is not very varied, yet there is something very attractive to me in these great treeless, rolling plains, and Nellie [his pet name for Elliott] and I are great chums, and in the evening, sit and compare our adventures in ‘other lands’ until bedtime which is pretty early.” [Illustration: Theodore Roosevelt in his twenty-second year. Elliott Roosevelt in his twenty-first year. Portrait taken in Chicago, July, 1880, on the way to the hunting trip of that season.] And again he writes a few weeks later from Chicago, in a very bantering vein: