208   My Brother Theodore Roosevelt

1902 I took my young daughter abroad to place her at a French school directed by Mademoiselle Souvestre in England. It was the spring when preparations were being made for the coronation of King Edward VII, and because of the fact that I was the sister of the President of the United States, I was received with great courtesy. Our dear friend Mr. Joseph H. Choate was then ambassador to England. Mrs. Choate presented me at court, and the King paid me the unusual compliment-out of respect to my brother-of leaving the dais on which he and the Queen stood, and came forward to greet me personally in order to ask for news of my brother. Special consideration was shown to me in so many ways that when Mr. Robinson and I were visiting Edinburgh, it seemed in no way unusual that we should be invited to Holyrood Castle to the reception given by the lord high commissioner, Lord Leven and Melville. It so happened that we were in Edinburgh during that week of festivity when the lord high commissioner of Scotland, appointed as special representative of the King of Great Britain, holds court in the old castle as though he were actually the King.

We had dined with friends before the reception, and were therefore late in reaching the castle, and were literally the last people at the end of the long queue approaching the dais on which Lord and Lady Leven and Melville stood. As King Edward had himself stepped forward to meet me in Buckingham Palace, I was not surprised when Lord Leven and Melville stepped down from the dais, and I expected him also to ask news of my brother, the President of the United States, as King Edward had done, but to my great surprise, and be it confessed intense pleasure, I heard the lord high commissioner speak as follows: "Mrs. Douglas Robinson, you have been greeted with special courtesy in our country because of your distinguished brother, the President of the United States, but I am greeting you with even greater interest because of your father, the first Theodore Roosevelt. You probably do not remember, for you were a little girl at the time, that a raw-boned young Scotch

Home Life in the White House 209

man named Ronald Leslie Melville came long ago to New York and was much at your home, having had letters of introduction to your father as one of the men best fitted to teach him the modern philanthropic methods used in America. Only to-day," he continued, "I told the children of Edinburgh, assembled, as is the custom, to listen to the lord high commissioner, that the father of the present President of the United States was the first man who taught me to love my fellow men."

My heart was very full as I made my courtesy and answered the lord high commissioner. Before he let me pass on he said, with a charming smile: "If you and Mr. Robinson will come tomorrow to lunch with us quietly I will take you to Lord Darnley's room, which is my dressing-room during the week of Holyrood festivities, and on my dressing-table you will see the photograph of your father, for I never go anywhere without it." I accepted the invitation gladly, and the next day we went to Holyrood Castle, lunched informally with the delightful chatelain and chatelaine, and I was taken, as the former promised, to see Lord Darnley's room, where my father's face smiled at me from the dressing-table. My brother loved to hear me tell this story, and I feel that it is not amiss to include it in any recollections concerning my brother, for he was truly the spirit of my father reincarnate.

In May, 1902, Mrs. Roosevelt writes that "Theodore" is just about to leave for a hunting trip, which she hopes will "rest" him. (The rest the year before, of writing a life of Oliver Cromwell, had not been made quite strenuous enough for a real rest!) Later he returned and made a famous speech in Providence, a speech epoch-making, and recognized as such by an English newspaper, The Morning Post of August 27, 1902, a clipping from which I have at hand, and which runs as follows:

"Our New York correspondent announced yesterday that President Roosevelt's great speech at Providence on the subject of `Trusts' is regarded on all sides and by both parties as an absolutely epoch-making event. This is not surprising to