Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
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| not always had it; certainly the President’s father did) the secret that binds families together with bonds which nothing can break: they are children with their boys and girls. How simple a secret, yet how many of us have lost it! I did not even know I was one of them, or what it was that had come between me and my little lad—the one who figured out after hours of deep study, when our second grandchild was born, that now he was “two uncles”—until one bright day last summer when I went fishing with him. I wanted to know where he went when he disappeared for whole days at a time; and when I volunteered to dig the bait by a new method that made the worms come up of themselves to locate a kind of earthquake I was causing, he took me by many secret paths to a pond hidden deep in the woods a mile away, which was his preserve. There we sat solemnly angling for shiners an inch long, with bent pins on lines of thread, and were nearly eaten up by mosquitoes. But to him it was lovely, and so it was to me, for it gave me back my boy. That evening, on the way home, his boyish hand stole into mine with a new confidence. We were chums now, and all was well. |