134   My Brother Theodore Roosevelt

that kept me away. Let me tell you Mr. Comisher, i hav bin mard five years antel the Other Da me and my wife hav bin the onley mbrs en ow Famly. Well Sir on the Da before youre examnenashun My Wife Had a Kupple ov tuins, gest think of it, Mr. Comischer-and of course i couddnt go off and Leave her and them. i just staid home and we had a sellabrationand i invited all my friends to dinner. i wish you had been thare. i Hope i can be thare next time Mr. Comischer.

Very truly yours.

I remember my brother saying humorously that, after all, that particular gentleman might just as well have stayed away with his "tuins" and "sellabration," as he really doubted whether he could have passed the "examnenashun" had he appeared!

VI

THE ELKHORN RANCH AND NEAR-ROUGHING
IT IN YELLOWSTONE PARK

From the cloistered life of American college boys, sheltered from the ruder currents of the world by the ramparts of wealth and gentle

nurture, he passed, still very young, to the wild and free existence of the plains and the hills. In the silence of those vast solitudes men

grow to full stature, when the original stuff is good. He came back to the East, bringing with him, as Tennyson sang, "The wrestling

thews that throw the world."   -From a speech by John Hay.

0 lover of the things God madeHill, valley, mountain, plain:

The lightning from the darkened cloud, The storm-burst with its rain.

M -Roosevelt, "Hymn of Molokai." Y brother has written so much about his own ranch, and has given so vivid a description in his autobiog

raphy of the life led there, of the wonderful stretches of the Bad Lands, of the swaying cottonwood-trees, and the big fireplace in the Elkhorn Ranch sitting-room, around which he and his fellow ranchers gathered, exhausted by a long day's cattle-herding or deer-hunting, that it hardly seems possible that I can add much to the picture already painted by his own facile hand: ranch life, however, viewed from the standpoint of the ou-sider or from that of the insider has a different quality, and thus no reminiscences of mine would be in any way complete were I not to describe my first delightful visit paid to Medora, Dakota, and the surrounding country, in 18go. Our party consisted of my brother and sister-in-law, my sister Mrs. Cowles, then Anna Roosevelt, our friend Robert Munro Ferguson, my

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