Children stopped to spell out the inscriptions, and sometimes asked what they meant. Once, a group of boys from a Massachusetts school inquired what the colors stood for, and asked to have the slogan translated. As by one impulse, they lifted their hats and said, “You ought to have it now.” Occasionally, distinguished visitors leaving the White House would smile their appreciation and approval. On one occasion Theodore Roosevelt beamed vividly on the pickets, waving his hat as he passed. As the weather changed and the winter storms began, the gaiety in the attitude of their audience deepened to a real admiration. With the rains, the pickets appeared in slickers and rubber hats. This was not, of course, unendurable. But, when the freezing cold came, often with snow and swirling winds, picketing became a real hardship. There were days when it was almost impossible to stand on the picket line for more than half an hour at a time. At regular intervals, Smith, the janitor, assisted at times by a little colored boy, used to appear from Headquarters, trundling a wheelbarrow. That wheelbarrow was piled high with hot bricks covered with gunny-sacking. He would distribute the bricks among the pickets and they would stand on them. An observer said that, when the relay of pickets, leaving at the end of the day, stepped down from the bricks at the word of command, it was like a line of statues stepping from their pedestals. But others—and sometimes strangers—sought to mitigate for the pickets the rigors of the freezing weather. One woman, coming regularly every day in her car, brought thermos bottles filled with hot coffee. On one occasion, a young girl—a passing volunteer—came on picket duty in a coat too light and shoes too low. While she stood there, a closed limousine drew up to the curb. A woman alighted and forced the girl to retire to her car and put on her fur coat and her gaiters. The stranger held the banner while the warming-up process was going on. She offered to organize a committee, made up of older women, who would collect warm clothing for the pickets. In point of fact, the Virginia and Philadelphia branches of the Congressional Union presented the pickets with thick gloves, spats, and slickers for rainy days. Thousands of men and women from all over the country sent suggestions for their comfort. Official kindness, even, was not lacking. One superlatively cold day, an attaché of the President invited the whole company of pickets into the East Room of the White House. The superintendents of the Treasury Building and the War Department Annex extended to them similar invitations. The police were, at the beginning, friendly, not only in words but in acts. An officer stopped one day, after telephoning at the near police box, to say: “You are making friends every minute. Stick to it! Do not give up. We are with you and admire your pluck.” The majority of them did not like to do what afterwards they had to do.