Christmas at Sagamore Hill with Theodore Roosevelt

The night was bitterly cold and a raw wind was blowing off the Bay, sending dry leaves scudding and whipping the naked boughs of the trees, when Theodore Roosevelt alighted from his carriage at Sagamore Hill. He got out backward very cautiously, easing his muscular bulk down lightly on his feet although he was holding both arms straight out before him. The burden they bore was precarious.

In his arms he balanced a great globe in which a dozen goldfish were swimming dizzily. Already a thin film of ice had formed on top of the water and fragments of it followed the fish about in their hysterical dashings back and forth.

He walked to the steps, setting his feet down firmly as not long since he had tramped the rough vine- and fern-tangled hills in Cuba. Only now, he thought gratefully, nobody was shooting at him.

The door of the big rambling house opened as he mounted the steps and warm light greeted him. So did a chorus of assorted shrieks.

“Father’s home!”

Four children came rushing out into the night, staid Alice trying to remember the dignity expected of a young lady of fourteen, Theodore, frail and owlish, peering through his spectacles, Kermit, slender and fair with legs that seemed too slim to support his wiry body, and after them four-year-old Archie, stumbling and falling flat on the cold floor.