Among the finches one of the most musical and plaintive songs is that of the bush-sparrow—­I do not know why the books call it field-sparrow, for it does not dwell in the open fields like the vesperfinch, the savannah-sparrow, and grasshopper-sparrow, but among the cedars and bayberry bushes and young locusts in the same places where the prairie warbler is found.  Nor is it only the true songs that delight us.  We love to hear the flickers call, and we readily pardon any one of their number which, as occasionally happens, is bold enough to wake us in the early morning by drumming on the shingles of the roof.  In our ears the red-winged blackbirds have a very attractive note.  We love the screaming of the red-tailed hawks as they soar high overhead, and even the calls of the night heron that nest in the tall water maples by one of the wood ponds on our place, and the little green herons that nest beside the salt marsh.  It is hard to tell just how much of the attraction in any bird-note lies in the music itself and how much in the associations.  This is what makes it so useless to try to compare the bird songs of one country with those of another.  A man who is worth anything can no more be entirely impartial in speaking of the bird songs with which from his earliest childhood he has been familiar than he can be entirely impartial in speaking of his own family.

At Sagamore Hill we love a great many things—­birds and trees and books, and all things beautiful, and horses and rifles and children and hard work and the joy of life.  We have great fireplaces, and in them the logs roar and crackle during the long winter evenings.  The big piazza is for the hot, still afternoons of summer.  As in every house, there are things that appeal to the householder because of their associations, but which would not mean much to others.  Naturally, any man who has been President, and filled other positions, accumulates such things, with scant regard to his own personal merits.  Perhaps our most cherished possessions are a Remington bronze, “The Bronco Buster,” given me by my men when the regiment was mustered out, and a big Tiffany silver vase given to Mrs. Roosevelt by the enlisted men of the battleship Louisiana after we returned from a cruise on her to Panama.  It was a real surprise gift, presented to her in the White House, on behalf of the whole crew, by four as strapping man-of-war’s-men as ever swung a turret or pointed a twelve-inch gun.  The enlisted men of the army I already knew well—­of course I knew well the officers of both army and navy.  But the enlisted men of the navy I only grew to know well when I was President.  On the Louisiana Mrs. Roosevelt and I once dined at the chief petty officers’ mess, and on another battleship, the Missouri (when I was in company with Admiral Evans and Captain Cowles), and again on the Sylph and on the Mayflower, we also dined as guests of the crew.  When we finished our trip on the Louisiana I made a short speech to