Raising the Regiment 15 



this championship from going to an Englishman. 

 So it was with Yale men like Waller, the high 

 jumper, and Garrison and Girard ; and with Prince- 

 ton men like Devereux and Channing, the football 

 players ; with Lamed, the tennis player ; with Craig 

 Wadsworth, the steeple-chase rider; with Joe Stev- 

 ens, the crack polo player ; with Hamilton Fish, the 

 ex-captain of the Columbia crew, and with scores of 

 others whose names are quite as worthy of mention 

 as any of those I have given. Indeed, they all sought 

 entry into the ranks of the Rough Riders as eagerly 

 as if it meant something widely different from hard 

 work, rough fare, and the possibility of death; and 

 the reason why they turned out to be such good sol- 

 diers lay largely in the fact that they were men who 

 had thoroughly counted the cost before entering, 

 and who went into the regiment because they be- 

 lieved that this offered their best chance for seeing 

 hard and dangerous service. Mason Mitchell, of 

 New York, who had been a chief of scouts in the 

 Kiel Rebellion, traveled all the way to San Antonio 

 to enlist; and others came there from distances as 

 great. 



Some of them made appeals to me which I could 

 not possibly resist. Woodbury Kane had been a 

 close friend of mine at Harvard. During the eigh- 

 teen years that had passed since my graduation I 

 had seen very little of him, though, being always 



