BOYHOOD AND EARLY LIFE 
27 
plumage. He thus cultivated the habit of observation and study, 
while his active outdoor life gave strength to his muscles and tough¬ 
ened his frame. 
And in these early days that love of the wild which has become a 
marked element of his character began to develop. He read stories 
of the great Western plains and began to long to set foot in the 
wilderness. Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales fell into his hands and 
these he devoured with a strong appetite. His friend Jacob Riis 
asked him once if he liked them. 
“Like them!” he exclaimed, with kindling eyes. “Like them! 
Why, man, there is nothing like them. I could pass an examination 
in the whole of them to-day. Deer slayer with his long rifle, Jasper 
and Hurry Harry, Ishmael Bush with his seven stalwart sons—do I 
not know them ? I have bunked with them and eaten with them, and 
I know their strength and their weakness. They were narrow and 
hard, but they did the work of their day and opened the way for ours. 
Do I like them? Cooper is unique in American literature, and he will 
grow upon us as we get farther away from his day, let the critics say 
what they will.” 
Roosevelt as a boy was a busy reader, as he has managed to be a 
busy reader amid the absorbing labors of his later life. But he was 
a true boy, one of the type which he has since laid down for the 
genuine American boy. 
“The chances are strong,” he says of young hopeful, “that he 
won’t be much of a man unless he is a good deal of a boy. He must 
not be a coward or a weakling, a bully, a shirk, or a prig. He must 
work hard and play hard. He must be clean-minded and clean-lived, 
and able to hold his own under all circumstances and against all 
comers. In life, as in football, the principle to follow is: Hit the line 
hard; don’t foul and don’t shirk, but hit the line hard.” He seems 
here speaking of himself. 
The time came when the active, energetic, somewhat strenuous 
lad with whose life story we are concerned entered Harvard College 
to complete his education. He was then eighteen years of age. It 
was an education of the type of that of his earlier years, one of much 
physical exercise and a fair share of mental discipline. He did his 
