Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/497

 room, he plunged at Dr. Weir Mitchell, shook him fiercely and ejaculated:

“I have just been reading one of your books,” and gave a quotation.

“That is the third time he has told me that story,” grumbled Mitchell, as he came away, “and I never wrote anything of the kind in my life.”

The address was unimportant in itself, but his coming showed kindness and was much appreciated.

I likewise sat on the platform and heard him make his address July 4, 1902, at Pittsburgh, noticing his habit of snapping off his words as though trying to bite through them with his teeth (perhaps this is what happened to “thru”) and heard another, later, before the Masons at Masonic Temple in Philadelphia. On the latter occasion he attracted much attention by coming at me, with both fists closed, glaring at me with assumed savagery, striking me on the chest with force enough to upset a light man, and shouting:

“Nothing like a double Dutchman, nothing like a double Dutchman!”

On Decoration Day of 1905, which was the first time Mr. Roosevelt had ever been at Gettysburg, I rode in a barouche with him, Mrs. Roosevelt and Ethel, over the grounds. Ethel was then a sweet, attractive little girl of about eleven years of age, and I tried to entertain her. She afterward wrote me a pretty little note which will be found among my papers. He asked me whether I had ever seen any military service and I told him that I had carried a musket for a brief period, and that it had been my fate to be in the first force to meet the rebels at Gettysburg. This aroused his keen interest and opened the way for me to tell him of the unequaled contribution of our family to that war, it having furnished two major generals, five colonels and in all one hundred and forty-eight men. “It is wonderful,” he said. Afterward I heard of his repeating the tale over the country. Rh