Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
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| THE Sylph had weighed anchor and was standing out for the open, sped on her way by a small gale that blew out of a bank of black cloud in the southeast. The sailors looked often and hard over the rail at the gathering gloom, the white-caps in the Sound, and the scudding drift overhead, prophesying trouble. A West Indian cyclone that had destroyed the crops in Jamaica and strewn our coast with wrecks had been lost for two days. It looked very much as if the Sylph, carrying the President from Oyster Bay to New York, had found it. And, indeed, before we reached the forts that guard the approach to the city, a furious hurricane churned the waters of the Sound and of the clouds into a maddening whirl in which it seemed as if so small a ship |