These experiences are funny enough now, but probably they were
tragic to him at the time. In a church in Venice there were at
least some moments of happiness. He writes of his sister "Conie":

"Conie jumped over tombstones spanked me banged Ellies head &c."

But in Paris the trip becomes too monotonous; and his diary says:

November 26. "I stayed in the house all day, varying the day with
brushing my hair, washing my hands and thinking in fact having a
verry dull time."

November 27. "I did the same thing as yesterday."

They all came back to New York and again he could study and amuse
himself with natural history. This study was one of his great
pleasures throughout life and when he was a man he knew more about
the animals of America than anybody except the great scholars who
devoted their lives to this alone.

It started with a dead seal that he happened to find laid out on a
slab in a market in Broadway. He was still a small boy, but when
he heard that the seal had been killed in the harbor, it reminded
him of the adventures he had been reading about in Mayne Reid's
books. He went back to the market, day after day, to look at the
seal, to try to measure it and to plan to own it and preserve it.
He did get the skull, and with two cousins started what they gave
the grand name of the "Roosevelt Museum of Natural History"!

Catching and keeping specimens for this museum gave him more fun