Within a few days, in fact on Christmas day, he was moved to Oyster Bay, and at first seemed benefited by the change. On Friday, January 3, I had arranged to go out and spend the day with him, but a message came that he was not quite as comfortable and would I wait until Monday, when he hoped to feel much better and enjoy my visit.

On the Sunday he seemed better again, my sister-in-law told me later, and enjoyed the whole day. He loved, passionately, his home at Sagamore Hill, and the view from it over the Sound on which he had rowed so often from boyhood up. He loved the beauty of the shrubs and trees and undulating wooded hills, and he loved best of all the sense of home there, and the happy family life which, even with a vacant chair, he knew would continue. He expressed his content that evening to Mrs. Roosevelt, in whose companionship he took the same delight as when in their youth he had brought her to be the adored mistress of that home.

Later in the evening he did not seem quite so well and she sent for the doctor, who, after testing him in various ways, pronounced his condition as very satisfactory. Relieved in mind, Mrs. Roosevelt left him in charge of his faithful attendant, James Amos, and shortly after she went out he turned to James and said, “Put out the light.” Once again his devoted wife came to his bedside, thinking she heard him stir, but found him sleeping peacefully. At four o’clock James detected a change in the breathing, and realizing that all was not well, called the trained nurse. In a few moments, as Senator Lodge said later in his great oration on his friend before the joint houses of Congress in Washington, “Valiant-for-Truth passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.”

* * * * *

That Sunday evening, just before Theodore Roosevelt told his faithful servant to “Put out the light,” there was a meeting held in New York under the auspices of the American Defense Society, at which he had hoped to be present. Not able to be there in person, he sent them a letter, and at the moment that he, at his beloved home on the hill, closed his eyes for the last time, his faithful followers listened to his ringing exhortation that there should be “no sagging back in Americanism.” The youth, twenty-three years of age, as an assemblyman at Albany had come to his native city to make his maiden address on that theme so near his heart, and the man, whose life-work, replete with patriotism, was drawing to a close, sent the same fervent message in his last hours to his fellow countrymen. All his life long he had been for those fellow countrymen “the patriotic sentinel; pacing the parapet of the Republic, alert to danger and every menace; in love with duty and service, and always unafraid.”—From Senator Warren G. Harding’s address on “Theodore Roosevelt” before the Senate and House of Ohio, late in January, 1919.

* * * * *

At six o’clock on that very Monday morning when I was hoping to go to him and enjoy his dear companionship, the telephone-bell in my room rang and my sister-in-law’s voice, gentle and self-controlled, though vibrant with grief, told me that he was gone, and that she wanted me to come at once to Sagamore. It was not long before my eldest son and I were climbing the familiar hill. As we neared the house, I could not bring myself to believe that the great personality who had always welcomed me there had passed away.

That afternoon Mrs. Roosevelt and I walked far and fast along the shore and through the woodlands he had loved, and on our return in the waning winter twilight we suddenly became conscious that airplanes were flying low around the house. In a tone of deep emotion Mrs. Roosevelt said: “They must be planes from the camp where Quentin trained. They have been sent as a guard of honor for his father.”

That night as I stood alone in the room where my brother lay, these lines came to me—I called them “Sagamore,” that old Indian word for which my brother cared so much. It means chief or chieftain, and Sagamore Hill, the chieftain’s hill.

SAGAMORE