About the first remark uttered in the speech, as the Colonel grinned broadly at the audience, was: "It takes more than one bullet to kill a Bull Moose. I'm all right, no occasion for any sympathy whatever, but I want to take this occasion within five minutes after having been shot to say some things to our people which I hope no one will question the profound sincerity of." Throughout his speech, which continued for an hour and twenty minutes, the doctors and his immediate staff of friends, sitting closely behind him, expected that he might at any moment collapse. I was so persuaded of this that I stepped over the front of the high platform to the reporters' section immediately beneath where he was speaking, so that I might catch him if he fell forward. These precautions, however, were unnecessary, for, while his speech lacked in the characteristic fluency of other speeches, while the shock and pain caused his argument to be somewhat labored, yet it was with a soldierly firmness and iron determination, which more than all things in Roosevelt's career discloses to the country the real Roosevelt, who at the close of his official service as President in 1909 left that high office the most beloved public figure in our history since Lincoln fell, and the most respected citizen of the world. As was said in an editorial in the Chicago Evening Post: "There is no false sentiment here; there is no self-seeking. The guards are down. The soul of the man stands forth as it is. In the Valley of the Shadow his own simple declaration of his sincerity, his own revelation of the unselfish quality of his devotion to the greatest movement of his generation, will be the standard by which history will pass upon Theodore Roosevelt its final judgment. This much they cannot take from him, no matter whether he is now to live or to die." To the men of America, who either love or hate Roosevelt personally, these words from his speech must carry an imperishable lesson: "The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech. But I will try my best. "And now, friends, I want to take advantage of this incident to say as solemn a word of warning as I know how to my fellow Americans. "First of all, I want to say this about myself: I have altogether too many important things to think of to pay any heed or feel any concern over my own death. "Now I would not speak to you insincerely within five minutes of being shot. I am telling you the literal truth when I say that my concern is for many other things. It is not in the least for my own life. "I want you to understand that I am ahead of the game anyway. No man has had a happier life than I have had--a happier life in every way. "I have been able to do certain things that I greatly wished to do, and I am interested in doing other things. "I can tell you with absolute truthfulness that I am very much uninterested in whether I am shot or not.