Reid’s books and other boys’ books of adventure, and I felt that this seal brought all these adventures in realistic fashion before me.  As long as that seal remained there I haunted the neighborhood of the market day after day.  I measured it, and I recall that, not having a tape measure, I had to do my best to get its girth with a folding pocket foot-rule, a difficult undertaking.  I carefully made a record of the utterly useless measurements, and at once began to write a natural history of my own, on the strength of that seal.  This, and subsequent natural histories, were written down in blank books in simplified spelling, wholly unpremeditated and unscientific.  I had vague aspirations of in some way or another owning and preserving that seal, but they never got beyond the purely formless stage.  I think, however, I did get the seal’s skull, and with two of my cousins promptly started what we ambitiously called the “Roosevelt Museum of Natural History.”  The collections were at first kept in my room, until a rebellion on the part of the chambermaid received the approval of the higher authorities of the household and the collection was moved up to a kind of bookcase in the back hall upstairs.  It was the ordinary small boy’s collection of curios, quite incongruous and entirely valueless except from the standpoint of the boy himself.  My father and mother encouraged me warmly in this, as they always did in anything that could give me wholesome pleasure or help to develop me.

The adventure of the seal and the novels of Mayne Reid together strengthened my instinctive interest in natural history.  I was too young to understand much of Mayne Reid, excepting the adventure part and the natural history part—­these enthralled me.  But of course my reading was not wholly confined to natural history.  There was very little effort made to compel me to read books, my father and mother having the good sense not to try to get me to read anything I did not like, unless it was in the way of study.  I was given the chance to read books that they thought I ought to read, but if I did not like them I was then given some other good book that I did like.  There were certain books that were taboo.  For instance, I was not allowed to read dime novels.  I obtained some surreptitiously and did read them, but I do not think that the enjoyment compensated for the feeling of guilt.  I was also forbidden to read the only one of Ouida’s books which I wished to read—­“Under Two Flags.”  I did read it, nevertheless, with greedy and fierce hope of coming on something unhealthy; but as a matter of fact all the parts that might have seemed unhealthy to an older person made no impression on me whatever.  I simply enjoyed in a rather confused way the general adventures.