Comparatively few little girls of fourteen have had so lover-like an attention from a father, and just such thought and tender, loving comprehension made our relationship to our father one of perfect comradeship, and yet of respectful adoration. He taught us all, when very young, to ride and to swim and to climb trees. I remember the careful way in which he would show us dead limbs and warn us about watching out for them, and then, having taught us and having warned us, he gave us full liberty to try our wings and fall by the wayside should they prove inadequate for our adventures. [Illustration: Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., aged thirty, 1862.] [Illustration: Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, twenty-two years old, about 1856.] After graduating from our first Shetland pony, he provided us each with a riding-horse, and always rode with us himself, and a merry cavalcade went forth from our country home, either early in the morning before he started for the train or in the soft summer evenings on his return. When at one time we were living on the Hudson River, we had hoped one autumn afternoon that he would come home early from the city, and great was our disappointment when a tremendous storm came up and we realized that he would take a later train, and that our beloved ride must be foregone. We were eagerly waiting in the hall for his return and watching the rain falling in torrents and the wind blowing it in gusts, when the depot wagon drove up to the door and my father leaped out, followed by the slight figure of a somewhat younger man. As the young man tried to put up his umbrella it blew inside out and, like a dilapidated pinwheel loosened from his hand, ran round and round in a circle. The unknown guest merrily chased the umbrella pinwheel, and my mother, who had joined us children at the window, laughingly wondered who my father’s new friend was. The front door opened and the two dripping men came in, and we rushed to meet them. I can see the laughing face of the young man become suddenly shy and a little self-conscious as my father said to my mother: “Mittie, I want to present to you a young man who in the future, I believe, will make his name well known in the United States. This is Mr. John Hay, and I wish the children to shake hands with him.” Many and many a time, long, long years after, when John Hay was secretary of state in the cabinet of the second Theodore Roosevelt, he used to refer to that stormy autumn afternoon when a delicate boy of eleven, at the instigation of his father, shook hands with him and looked gravely up into his face, wondering perhaps how John Hay was going to make his name known throughout the United States. How little did Mr. Hay think then that one day he would be the secretary of state when that same little delicate boy was President of the United States. My father’s intimacy with John Hay had come about through the fact of contact in the Civil War, when they both worked so hard in Washington together.