worst of it. But about the other fellows he told the whole
truth with lightning flashes of wit and character building and
admiration or contempt. Until the invention of moving
pictures the world had nothing in the least like his talk.
His eye had photographed, his mind had developed and prepared
the slides, his words sent the light through them, and lo and
behold, they were reproduced on the screen of your own mind,
exact in drawing and color. With the written word or the
spoken word he was the greatest recorder and reporter of
things that he had seen of any man, perhaps, that ever lived.
The history of the last thirty years, its manners and customs
and its leading events and inventions, cannot be written
truthfully without reference to the records which he has left,
to his special articles and to his letters. Read over again
the Queen's Jubilee, the Czar's Coronation, the March of the
Germans through Brussels, and see for yourself if I speak too
zealously, even for a friend, to whom, now that R. H. D. is
dead, the world can never be the same again.

But I did not set out to estimate his genius. That matter
will come in due time before the unerring tribunal of
posterity.

One secret of Mr. Roosevelt's hold upon those who come into
contact with him is his energy. Retaining enough for his own
use (he uses a good deal, because every day he does the work
of five or six men), he distributes the inexhaustible
remainder among those who most need it. Men go to him tired
and discouraged, he sends them away glad to be alive, still
gladder that he is alive, and ready to fight the devil himself