Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
Page 318
| filled with reminders of the stirring life its owner has led in camp and on the hunting-trail, and with a broad piazza on the side that catches the cool winds of summer. But it is homelike rather than imposing. It is the people themselves who put the stamp upon it,—the life they live there together. |
| Truly, together. The President is boy with his boys there. He puts off the cares of state and takes a hand in their games; and if they lagged before, they do not lag then. It is he who sets Josiah, the badger, free, and bids all hands skip, and skip lively; for Josiah’s one conscious aim, when out of his cage, appears to be to nip a leg,—any leg, even a Presidential leg, within reach,—and he makes for them all successively in his funny, preoccupied way. Josiah, then a very small baby badger, was heaved on board the Presidential train out in Kansas last year, by a little girl who shouted his name after the train, and was brought up on a nursing-bottle till he cut his teeth. Since then he has been quite able to shift for himself. At present he looks more like a small, flat mattress, with a leg under each corner, than anything else. That is the President’s description of |