June 8, 1887, he writes from Sagamore, describing amusingly his efforts to become a polo-player. He has often expressed his own feeling about sports--he loved them, enjoyed his hunting and other athletic exercises to the full, but they were always a relaxation, never a pursuit with him. “Frank Underhill and I ride industriously around the field and brandish our mallets so as to foster the delusion among simple folk that we likewise are playing polo. Two other would-be players also come now and then; but as they have not yet even learned to sit on horseback and strike the ball simultaneously, and, after trial, having found it impracticable to do so alternately, our games are generally duels. Yesterday, I beat Frank two out of three--and in addition, stood on my head on the sward in the enthusiasm of one mêlée where we got rather mixed. Day before yesterday, I rowed Edith to Lloyd’s Neck, portaged across--at low tide, the hardest work I ever did almost,--into Huntington Harbor, then rowed out into the Sound. We took our lunch and some volumes of Thackeray. It was an ideal day--but wasn’t I stiff and blistered next morning! Do come soon and stay as long as possible. Yours as ever, Theodore Roosevelt.” During that same summer I took my little niece Alice, with my children, to our old home on the Mohawk Hills for a change of air, and he writes me in his usual loving way of his warm appreciation of the pleasure I was giving the child, and sends his love to the little “yellow-haired darling,” and incidentally, in the letters, says his book “Morris [”Gouverneur Morris“] goes drearily on by fits and starts, and in the intervals, I chop vigorously and have lovely rowing excursions”; and so the happy summer wore to its close and was crowned in September by the birth of his first boy, the third Theodore Roosevelt. He describes with amusement little Alice’s remark--“a truthful remark,” he says--“_My little brother_ is a howling polly parrot.” All through the letter one realizes his joy and pride in his firstborn son, and shortly after that, in December of the same year, he writes me to congratulate me on the birth of my second son, Monroe, and says: “How glad I am that Ted, Junior, has a future playmate. Just won’t they quarrel, though!”