Politics, when Mr. Roosevelt was active, were not dull.  Few men have ever made them so lively and interesting.  Every activity in life meant something to him, a chance for useful work or for good fun.  He had a perfectly “corking time,” he said, when he was President, and the words shocked a number of good people who had pardoned or overlooked dirty actions by other public men, so long as these other men kept up a certain copy-book behavior which they thought was “dignity.”

It is a question if any man ever had a better time, ever had more real fun in his life, than did Mr. Roosevelt.  In spite of the hard work he put in, in spite of long days and weeks of drudgery he knew how to get happiness out of every minute.  He did not engage in drinking and gambling for his amusements.  He did not adopt a priggish attitude on these matters,—­he simply knew that there were other things which were better sport.  He was a religious man, a member all his life of his father’s church, but religion did not sour him, make him gloomy, or cause him to interfere with other people about their belief or lack of it.

He got an immense amount of pleasure in his family life, in half a dozen kinds of athletic sports, especially the ones which led him outdoors, and in books.  In these things he was marvelously wise or marvelously fortunate.  Some men’s lives are spent indoors, in an office or in a study among books.  Their amusements are indoor games, and they come to despise or secretly to envy, the more fortunate men who live outdoors.

Some of the outdoors men, on the other hand, become almost as one-sided.  Knowing nothing of the good fun that is in books they deny themselves much pleasure, and take refuge in calling “high-brows” the men who have simply more common sense and capacity for enjoyment than themselves.

Mr. Roosevelt, more than most men of his time, certainly more than any other public man, could enjoy to the utmost the best things the world has in it.  He knew the joy of the hard and active life in the open, and he knew the keen pleasure of books.  So when he returned to America after his marriage in 1886, he built a house on Sagamore Hill at Oyster Bay on Long Island.  Here he could ride, shoot, row, look after his farm, and here in the next year or two he wrote two books.  One was the life of Gouverneur Morris, American minister to France in the early years of our nation; the other a life of Senator Thomas H. Benton of Missouri.

But he was not long to stay out of political office.  In 1888 President Cleveland had been defeated for reelection by the Republican candidate, Benjamin Harrison.  The new President appointed Mr. Roosevelt as one of the Civil Service Commissioners, with his office in Washington.