The summers we spent in the country, now at one place, now at another.  We children, of course, loved the country beyond anything.  We disliked the city.  We were always wildly eager to get to the country when spring came, and very sad when in the late fall the family moved back to town.  In the country we of course had all kinds of pets—­cats, dogs, rabbits, a coon, and a sorrel Shetland pony named General Grant.  When my younger sister first heard of the real General Grant, by the way, she was much struck by the coincidence that some one should have given him the same name as the pony. (Thirty years later my own children had their pony Grant.) In the country we children ran barefoot much of the time, and the seasons went by in a round of uninterrupted and enthralling pleasures—­supervising the haying and harvesting, picking apples, hunting frogs successfully and woodchucks unsuccessfully, gathering hickory-nuts and chestnuts for sale to patient parents, building wigwams in the woods, and sometimes playing Indians in too realistic manner by staining ourselves (and incidentally our clothes) in liberal fashion with poke-cherry juice.  Thanksgiving was an appreciated festival, but it in no way came up to Christmas.  Christmas was an occasion of literally delirious joy.  In the evening we hung up our stockings—­or rather the biggest stockings we could borrow from the grown-ups—­and before dawn we trooped in to open them while sitting on father’s and mother’s bed; and the bigger presents were arranged, those for each child on its own table, in the drawing-room, the doors to which were thrown open after breakfast.  I never knew any one else have what seemed to me such attractive Christmases, and in the next generation I tried to reproduce them exactly for my own children.

My father, Theodore Roosevelt, was the best man I ever knew.  He combined strength and courage with gentleness, tenderness, and great unselfishness.  He would not tolerate in us children selfishness or cruelty, idleness, cowardice, or untruthfulness.  As we grew older he made us understand that the same standard of clean living was demanded for the boys as for the girls; that what was wrong in a woman could not be right in a man.  With great love and patience, and the most understanding sympathy and consideration, he combined insistence on discipline.  He never physically punished me but once, but he was the only man of whom I was ever really afraid.  I do not mean that it was a wrong fear, for he was entirely just, and we children adored him.  We used to wait in the library in the evening until we could hear his key rattling in the latch of the front hall, and then rush out to greet him; and we would troop into his room while he was dressing, to stay there as long as we were permitted, eagerly examining anything which came out of his pockets which could be regarded as an attractive novelty.  Every child has fixed in his memory various details which strike it as of