Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
Page 10
| found out and that they did not come back often. |
| A woman who lived next door to the Roosevelts in East Twentieth Street told me of how, passing in the street, she saw young Theodore hanging out of a second-story window and ran in to tell his mother. |
| “If the Lord,” said she, as she made off to catch him, “had not taken care of Theodore, he would have been killed long ago.” |
| In after years the Governor of New York told me, with a reminiscent gleam in his eye, how his boy, the third Theodore in line, had “swarmed down” the leader of the Executive Mansion to go and hear the election returns, rather than go out through the door. There was no frightened neighbor to betray his exploit then, for it was dark, which made it all the more exciting. It was the Governor himself who caught him. The evidence is, I think, that the Theodores were cut out pretty much on the same pattern. |
| Of that happy childhood’s home, with the beautiful mother of blessed memory and the father who rode and played with the children, and was that, alas! rarest of parents, their |