THE BOY WHO GREW STRONG
Not in a Log Cabin
Theodore Roosevelt, unlike Abraham Lincoln, was not born in a log cabin. On the contrary, he was born to wealth and position in the City of New York.
He was reared in an elegant home and educated in one of the famous universities of the Country. He read law, but he had no need to practise a profession. His father had retired from business, and there was no occasion for the son to take up a business career.
But Theodore Roosevelt preferred for himself a life of toil—the strenuous life.
Ill-health was the first and greatest of all his disadvantages. “When a boy,” said he, “I was pig-chested and asthmatic.”
From earliest infancy he was called to battle with asthma. It lowered his vitality and threatened his growth. His body was frail, but within was the conquering spirit. He determined to be strong like other boys.
In this, he had the loving help of gentle parents. On the wide back porch of their home in the City of New York, they fitted up a gymnasium, where he strove for bodily vigour with all his might. Although at the start, his pole climbing was very poor, he kept trying until he got to the top. He would carry his gymnastic exercises to the perilous verge of the window ledge, more to the alarm of the neighbours than of his own family.
In the Wide Out-of-Doors
Summer was the season of Roosevelt’s delight. Then he ceased to be a city boy. At his father’s country place on Long Island, he learned to run and ride, row, and swim. And when the long sleepless nights came, the father would take his invalid boy in his arms, wrap him up warmly, and drive with him in the free open air through fifteen or twenty miles of darkness.