which your children as well as my own treat me as a friend and playmate.
It has its comic side. They were all bent upon having me take them;
they obviously felt that my presence was needed to give zest to the
entertainment. I do not think that one of them saw anything incongruous
in the President's getting as bedaubed with mud as they got, or in my
wiggling and clambering around jutting rocks, through cracks, and up
what were really small cliff faces, just like the rest of them; and
whenever any one of them beat me at any point, he felt and expressed
simple and whole-hearted delight, exactly as if it had been a triumph
over a rival of his own age."

When the time came that he was no longer the children's chosen playmate,
he recognized the fact with a twinge of sadness. Writing in January,
1905, to his daughter Ethel, who was at Sagamore Hill at the time,
he said of a party of boys that Quentin had at the White House: "They
played hard, and it made me realize how old I had grown and how very
busy I had been the last few years to find that they had grown so that
I was not needed in the play. Do you recollect how we all of us used to
play hide and go seek in the White House, and have obstacle races down
the hall when you brought in your friends?"

Deep and abiding love of children, of family and home, that was the
dominating passion of his life. With that went love for friends and
fellow men, and for all living things, birds, animals, trees, flowers,
and nature in all its moods and aspects. But love of children and
family and home was above all. The children always had an old-fashioned
Christmas in the White House. In several letters in these pages,
descriptions of these festivals will be found. In closing one of them
the eternal child's heart in the man cries out: "I wonder whether there
ever can come in life a thrill of greater exaltation and rapture than