On May 3 he writes in a humorous vein: “Pet Pussie: At last the deed is done and I have shaved off my whiskers! The consequence, I am bound to add, is that I look like a dissolute democrat of the Fourth Ward; I send you some tintypes I had taken; the front views are pretty good, although giving me an expression of glum misery that I sincerely hope is not natural. The side views do not resemble me any more than they do Michael Angelo or John A. Weeks. The next four months are going to be one ‘demnition grind’ but by great good luck, I shall be able to leave here June 5th, I think.” The whiskers were permanently removed and never again reappeared, except on his hunting trip the following year, and I think he felt, himself, that the lack of them added a touch of elegance to his appearance, for he writes again within a day or two: “I rode over on Saturday morning (very swell with hunting crop and beaver) to Chestnut Hill where I took lunch with the Lees.” He is beginning to be quite a gentleman of fashion, and so the care-free days glide by, another summer comes, with pleasant visits, and another Maine woods excursion; but even when writing in the midst of house-parties of bewildering gaiety, he adds at the end of a long letter in August, 1879, “For my birthday, among the books I most want are the complete editions of Prescott, Motley, and Carlyle,” and signs himself “Your loving St. Buv.,” a new pet name which he had given himself and which was a conglomerate of St. Beuve, for whose writings he had great admiration, and the brother for whom his little sister had such great admiration.
His last year at college was one of equal growth, although the development was not as apparent as in his junior year, and in June, 1880, he graduated with honors, a happy, successful Harvard alumnus. A number of his New York friends went on for class day, and all made merry together, and not long afterwards he and his brother Elliott started on a hunting trip together. Elliott, who as a young child had been the strong one, when Theodore was a delicate little boy, had, during the years of adolescence, been somewhat of an invalid and could not go to college; our father, wise as ever, decided he must have his education in another way, and he arranged for Elliott to spend several years largely in the open air. He became a splendid shot, and my brother Theodore always felt that Elliott was far the better hunter of the two. The brothers were devoted to each other, and were each the complement of the other in character. Theodore writes from Wilcox’s farm, Illinois, August 22, 1880: “Darling Pussie: We have been having a lovely time so far, have shot fair quantities of game, are in good health, though our fare and accommodations are of the roughest. The shooting is great fun; you would laugh to see us start off in a wagon, in our rough, dirty, hunting-suits, not looking very different from our driver; a stub-tailed, melancholy looking pointer under the front seat, and a yellow, fool idea of a setter under the back one, which last is always getting walked on and howling dismally. We enjoy the long drives very much: the roads are smooth and lovely, and the country, a vast undulating prairie, cut up by great fields of corn and wheat with few trees. The birds are not very plentiful, but of great variety; we get prairie chickens in the stubble fields, plover in the pastures, snipe in the ‘slews,’ and ducks in the ponds. We hunt about an hour or two in a place, then get into our wagon and drive on, so that, though we cover a very large tract of country, we are not very tired at the end of the day, only enough to make us sleep well. The climate is simply superb, and though the scenery is not very varied, yet there is something very attractive to me in these great treeless, rolling plains, and Nellie [his pet name for Elliott] and I are great chums, and in the evening, sit and compare our adventures in ‘other lands’ until bedtime which is pretty early.”
Theodore Roosevelt
in his twenty-second year.
Elliott Roosevelt
in his twenty-first year.
Portrait taken in Chicago, July, 1880, on the way to the hunting trip of that season.
And again he writes a few weeks later from Chicago, in a very bantering vein:
September 12, 1880—Darling Pussie: We have come back here after a week’s hunting in Iowa. Elliott revels in the change to civilization—and epicurean pleasures. As soon as we got here he took some ale to get the dust out of his throat; then a milk punch because he was thirsty; a mint julep because it was hot; a brandy mash “to keep the cold out of his stomach”; and then sherry and bitters to give him an appetite. He took a very simple dinner—soup, fish, salmi de grouse, sweetbread, mutton, venison, corn, macaroni, various vegetables and some puddings and pies, together with beer, later claret and in the evening, shandigaff. I confined myself to roast beef and potatoes; when I took a second help he marvelled at my appetite—and at bedtime, wondered why in thunder he felt “stuffy” and I didn’t. The good living also reached his brain, and he tried to lure me into a discussion about the intellectual development of the Hindoos, coupled with some rather discursive and scarcely logical digressions about the Infinity of the Infinite, the Sunday school system, and the planet Mars, together with some irrelevant remarks about Texan “Jack Rabbits” which are apparently about as large as good-sized cows. Elliott says that these remarks are incorrect and malevolent; but I say they pay him off for his last letter about my eating manners! We have had very good fun so far, in spite of a succession of untoward accidents and delays. I broke both my guns, Elliott dented his, and the shooting was not as good as we had expected; I got bitten by a snake and chucked headforemost out of the wagon.
Your Seedy Brother, Theo.
Nothing could better exemplify the intimate, comprehending relationship of the two brothers than the above letter, in which, with exaggerated fun, Theodore “pays Elliott off” for his criticisms of the future President’s eating manners! All through their lives—alas! Elliott’s life was to end prematurely at the age of thirty-three—the same relationship endured between them. Each was full of rare charm, joy of life, and unselfish interest in his fellow man, and thus they had much in common always.
The hunting trip described so vividly in these two letters was, in a sense, the climax of this period of my brother’s life. College days were over, the happy summer following his graduation was also on the wane, and within a brief six weeks from the time these letters were written, Theodore Roosevelt, a married man, was to go forth on the broader avenues of his life’s destiny.