attend school with other boys and, indeed, his realization that
he could not meet them on equal physical terms made him timid
when he was thrown with them. So he pursued his own tastes with
all the more zeal. He read many books, some of which seemed
beyond a boy's ken, but he got something from each of them. His
power of concentration already surprised his family. If he was
absorbed in a chapter, nothing which went on outside of him,
either noise or interruption, could distract his attention. His
passion for natural his tory increased. At the age of ten, he
opened in one of the rooms of his home "The Roosevelt Museum of
Natural History." Later, he devoted himself more particularly to
birds, and learned from a taxidermist how to skin and stuff his
specimens.

In 1873, President Grant appointed Mr. Roosevelt a Commissioner
to the Vienna Exposition and the Roosevelt family made another
foreign tour. Hoping to benefit Theodore's asthma they went to
Algiers, and up the Nile, where he was much more interested in
the flocks of aquatic fowl than in the half-buried temples of
Dendera or the obelisks and pylons of Karnak. He even makes no
mention of the Pyramids, but records with enthusiasm that he
found at Cairo a book by an English clergyman, whose name he
forgot, on the ornithology of the Nile, which greatly helped him.
Incidentally, he says that from the Latin names of the birds he
made his first acquaintance with that language. While Mr.
Roosevelt attended to his duties in Vienna the younger children
were placed in the family of Herr Minckwitz, a Government
official at Dresden. There, Theodore, "in spite of himself,"
learned a good deal of German, and he never forgot his pleasant
life among the Saxons in the days be fore the virus of Prussian