He had something else to fight against:  bad health.  He writes:  “I was a sickly, delicate boy, suffered much from asthma, and frequently had to be taken away on trips to find a place where I could breathe.  One of my memories is of my father walking up and down the room with me in his arms at night, when I was a very small person, and of sitting up in bed gasping, with my father and mother trying to help me.  I went very little to school.  I never went to the public schools, as my own children later did.” [Footnote:  “Autobiography.”] For a few months he went to a private school, his aunt taught him at home, and he had tutors there.

When he was ten his parents took him with his brother and sisters for a trip to Europe, where he had a bad time indeed.  Like most boys, he cared nothing for picture-galleries and the famous sights, he was homesick and he wished to get back to what really pleased him,—­that is, collecting animals.  He was already interested in that.  And only when he could go to a museum and see, as he wrote in his diary, “birds and skeletons” or go “for a spree” with his sister and buy two shillings worth of rock-candy, did he enjoy himself in Europe.

His sister knew what he thought about the things one is supposed to see in Europe, and in her diary set it down: 

“I am so glad Mama has let me stay in the butiful hotel parlor while the poor boys have been dragged off to the orful picture galary.”

These experiences are funny enough now, but probably they were tragic to him at the time.  In a church in Venice there were at least some moments of happiness.  He writes of his sister “Conie”: 

“Conie jumped over tombstones spanked me banged Ellies head &c.”

But in Paris the trip becomes too monotonous; and his diary says: 

November 26.  “I stayed in the house all day, varying the day with brushing my hair, washing my hands and thinking in fact having a verry dull time.”

November 27.  “I did the same thing as yesterday.”

They all came back to New York and again he could study and amuse himself with natural history.  This study was one of his great pleasures throughout life and when he was a man he knew more about the animals of America than anybody except the great scholars who devoted their lives to this alone.

It started with a dead seal that he happened to find laid out on a slab in a market in Broadway.  He was still a small boy, but when he heard that the seal had been killed in the harbor, it reminded him of the adventures he had been reading about in Mayne Reid’s books.  He went back to the market, day after day, to look at the seal, to try to measure it and to plan to own it and preserve it.  He did get the skull, and with two cousins started what they gave the grand name of the “Roosevelt Museum of Natural History”!