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The Dresden Literary American Club 93

spiritual and intellectual benefit. As I write I can hear my father's voice calling us to early "Morning Prayers" which it was his invariable custom to read just before breakfast. Even this religious service was entered into with the same joyous zest which my father had the power of putting into every act of his life, and he had imbued us with the feeling that it was a privilege rather than a duty to be present, and that also the place of honor while we listened to the reading of the Bible was the seat on the sofa between him and the end of the sofa. When we were little children in the nursery, as he called to us to come to prayers, there would be a universal shout of "I speak for you and the cubby-hole too," the "cubby-hole" being this much-desired seat; and as my brother grew to man's estate these happy and yet serious memories were so much a part of him that when the boy of eighteen left Oyster Bay that September afternoon in 1876, to take up the new life which the entrance into college always means for a young man, he took with him as the heritage of his boyhood not only keen joy in the panorama of life which now unrolled before him but the sense of duty to be performed, of opportunity to be seized, of high resolve to be squared with practical and effective action, all of which had been part of the teaching of his father, the first Theodore Roosevelt.

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