A trifling bit of thistledown for memory to have preserved after all these years; but still it is interesting to me to recall that this was the beginning of the public speaking of the man who later addressed more audiences than any other orator of his time and made a deeper impression by his spoken word. One other reminiscence of Roosevelt at Harvard, almost as unsubstantial as this. Late in his Senior year we had a committee meeting of the Alpha Delta Phi in Charles Washburn's room at 15 Holworthy. Roosevelt and I sat in the window-seat overlooking the College Yard and chatted together in the intervals when business was slack. We discussed what we intended to do after graduation. "I am going to try to help the cause of better government in New York City; I don't know exactly how," said Theodore. I recall, still, looking hard at him with an eager, inquisitive look and saying to myself, "I wonder whether he is the real thing, or only the bundle of eccentricities which he appears." There was in me then, as there has always been, a mingling of skepticism and of deep reverence for those who dealt with reality, and I had not had sufficient opportunity to determine whether Roosevelt was real or not. One at least of his classmates, however, saw portents of greatness in Theodore, from their Freshman year, and most of us, even when we were amused and puzzled by his " queerness," were very sure that the man from whom they sprang was not commonplace. So far as I remember, Roosevelt was the first undergraduate to own and drive a dog-cart. This excited various comments; so did the reddish, powder-puff side whiskers which no chaffing could make him cut. There was never the slightest suggestion of the gilded youth about him; though dog-carts, especially when owned by young men, implied the habits and standards of the gilded rich. How explain the paradox? On the other hand, Theodore taught Sunday School at Christ Church, but he was so muscular a Christian that the decorous vestrymen thought him an unwise guide in piety. For one day a boy came to class with a black eye which he had got in fighting a larger boy for pinching his sister. Theodore told him that he did perfectly right--that every boy ought to defend any girl from insult--and he gave him a dollar as a reward. The vestrymen decided that this was too flagrant approval of fisticuffs; so the young teacher soon found a welcome in the Sunday School of a different denomination.