Quickly turning to one of the pages he pointed to the line, The hidden warmth of the Polar Sea.
“What do you think of that?” he demanded. “Did you ever think of the Polar Sea as being warm? And by Jove he’s right,—it is warm!”
Later, in Washington, I accepted his invitation for luncheon at the White House and for an afternoon in his library, where we continued our discussion of books. Before we turned to the volumes, he showed me some of the unusual presents which various potentates had given him, such as a jade bear from the Tzar of Russia, a revolver from Admiral Togo, and line drawings made personally by the Kaiser, showing in detail every ship in our Navy. When I expressed surprise that such exact knowledge should be in the possession of another country, my host became serious.
“The Kaiser is a most extraordinary fellow,” he said deliberately,—“not every one realizes how extraordinary. He and I have corresponded ever since I became President, and I tell you that if his letters were ever published they would bring on a world war. Thank God I don’t have to leave them behind when I retire. That’s one prerogative the President has, at any rate.”
I often thought of these comments after the World War broke out. An echo of them came while the desperate struggle was in full force. Ernest Harold Baynes, nature-lover and expert on birds, was visiting at my house, having dined with the ex-President at Oyster Bay the week before. In speaking of the dinner, Baynes said that Roosevelt declared that had he been President, Germany would never have forced the war at the time she did. When pressed to explain, Roosevelt said:
“The Kaiser would have remembered what he outlined to me in some letters he wrote while I was President. Bill knows me, and I know Bill!”
From the library we extended our examination to the family living-room, where there were other volumes of interest on the tables or in the bookcases. From these, the President picked up a hand-lettered, illuminated manuscript which he had just received as a present from King Menelik of Abyssinia. Some one had told him that it was a manuscript of the twelfth or thirteenth century, but to a student of the art of illumination it was clearly a modern copy of an old manuscript. The hand lettering was excellent, but the decoration included colors impossible to secure with the ancient pigments, and the parchment was distinctly of modern origin.
“You are just the one to tell me about this,” Mr. Roosevelt exclaimed. “Is it an original manuscript?”
He so obviously wished to receive an affirmative reply that I temporized by asking if some letter of description had not come with it.
“Oh, yes,” he replied, immediately divining the occasion of my question and showing his disappointment; “there was a missive, which is now in the archives of the State Department. I saw a translation of it, but it is only one of those banal expressions similar to any one of my own utterances, when I cable, for instance, to my imperial brother, the Emperor of Austria, how touched and moved I am to learn that his cousin, the lady with the ten names, has been safely delivered of a child!”