“Kermit is a great pleasure to me. My trouble with him is that he is altogether too bold,—pushing, daring, almost to recklessness.”
Writing in October to my husband (there never was a more devoted friendship than existed between him and my husband), he says:
“You old trump, Douglas. I really do believe that you are about the best fellow and the staunchest friend alive. Your letter was really delightful. I am so glad Bridges told you that they liked the Scribner articles. I only hope they guess right as far as the public is concerned.
“I hope the Robinson Minimus or Minima has arrived. [Referring to the expected baby in my eldest son’s family.] Of course, to go back to Henderson was terribly hard for you both at first, but it would have been the worst possible mistake to have avoided it or left it. The nettle had to be grasped.”
What a characteristic sentence! It had been very hard to go back to our old home, but, as he said, “the nettle had to be grasped.” I don’t think in his whole life he failed to grasp any nettle that had to be grasped. In a letter of the same date to me he says, referring again to our sorrow: “As our lives draw toward the end, we are sure to meet bitter sorrow, and we must meet it undauntedly. I have just been writing Cabot and Nannie [they had lost their talented son, the young poet George Cabot Lodge] and again, there was nothing for me to say.... It has been a horrible wrench for me to leave Edith during this trip, but I am sure I have done the wise thing from every standpoint.”
On January 21, 1910, as he is nearing civilization once more, in a letter dated on the Upper Nile, he writes: “Certainly our trip has been a complete success. If we did not shoot another thing, it would still remain unique, for the great quantity of skins and other scientific specimens collected for the museum; and personally, I do not care if I do not fire off my rifle again. I have enjoyed the trip to the full and feel that it was well worth making. I am naturally overjoyed that I am to see Edith in less than eight weeks, and I shall never go away from her again if I can help it. The ‘Pigskin Library’ continues to be a wellspring of comfort. Darling sister, I love you very much. Your devoted brother.”
On March 10, 1910, in another letter dated Upper White Nile, he says:
“Darling sister mine: At Gondokoro I found your welcome letter; and on the steamer, descending the 1100 miles to Khartoum, bumping into sand banks, and doing various odd things, I send you this line of answer.
“Joe Alsop [my only daughter had just become engaged to Joseph Wright Alsop, of Connecticut] represents to me what I like to think of as the ideal American citizen—pretty strong praise, and I mean every word of it. I should be overjoyed if Ethel married a man like him. He is the big, brave, strong, good man of sound common sense, who works hard in the country, who does his duty in politics, who would make a fine type of soldier in civil war. I have always put him in the same class with Bob Ferguson, and with Pinchot, Garfield, Cooley, and the rest of the ‘Tennis Cabinet.’”
His “Tennis Cabinet” shared the same warm corner of his heart in which his “Rough Riders” were firmly ensconced!