accident, of which for many years only his intimate friends were
aware, convinced him of the unwisdom of the game for a man of his
age and optical disabilities. A young artillery captain, with
whom he was boxing in the White House, cross-countered him on the
left eye, and the blow broke the little blood-vessels. Ever
afterward, the sight of that eye was dim; and, as he said, "if it
had been the right eye I should have been entirely unable to
shoot." To "a mighty hunter before the Lord" like Theodore
Roosevelt, such a result would have been a cardinal calamity.

By the time his experiences in the West were over, Roosevelt's
fight for health had achieved its purpose. Bill Sewall, the
woodsman who had introduced the young Roosevelt to the life of
the out-of-doors in Maine, and who afterward went out West with
him to take up the cattle business, offers this testimony: "He
went to Dakota a frail young man, suffering from asthma and
stomach trouble. When he got back into the world again, he was as
husky as almost any man I have ever seen who wasn't dependent on
his arms for his livelihood. He weighed one hundred and fifty
pounds, and was clear bone, muscle, and grit."

This battle won by the force of sheer determination, the young
Roosevelt never ceased fighting. He knew that the man who
neglects exercise and training, no matter how perfect his
physical trim, is certain to "go back." One day many years
afterward on Twenty-third Street, on the way back from an Outlook
editorial luncheon, I ran against his shoulder, as one often will
with a companion on crowded city streets, and felt as if it were
a massive oak tree into which I had bumped. Roosevelt the grown
man of hardened physique was certainly a transformation from that