One day while there, as we were walking through an old weedy field, I chanced to spy, out of the corner of my eye, a nighthawk sitting on the ground only three or four yards away. I called Roosevelt's attention to it and said, "Now, Mr. President, I think with care you can drop your hat over that bird." So he took off his sombrero and crept up on the bird, and was almost in a position to let his hat drop over it when the bird flew to a near tree, alighting lengthwise on the branch as this bird always does. Roosevelt approached it again cautiously and almost succeeded in putting his hand upon it; the bird flew just in time to save itself from his hand.
One Sunday after church he took me to a field where he had recently seen and heard Lincoln's sparrow. We loitered there, reclining upon the dry grass for an hour or more, waiting for the sparrow, but it did not appear.
During my visit there we named over seventy-five species of birds and fowl, he knowing all of them but two, and I knowing all but two. He taught me Bewick's wren and the prairie warbler, and I taught him the swamp sparrow and one of the rarer warblers; I think it was the pine warbler. If he had found the Lincoln sparrow again, he would have been one ahead of me.
I remember talking politics a little with him while we were waiting for the birds, and, knowing that he was expecting Taft to be his successor, I expressed my doubts as to Taft's being able to fill his shoes.
"Oh, yes, he can," he said confidently; "you don't know him as well as I do."
"Of course not," I admitted; "but my feeling is that, though Taft is an able and amiable man, he is not a born leader."
(I am glad to say that Mr. Taft's recent course in support of the proposed League of Nations has quite brought me around to Roosevelt's estimate of him.)
Pine Knot is a secluded place in the woods. One evening as we sat in the lamplight, he reading Lord Cromer on Egypt, and I a book on the man-eating lions of Tsavo, and Mrs. Roosevelt sitting near with her needlework, suddenly Roosevelt's hand came down on the table with such a bang that it made us both jump, and Mrs. Roosevelt exclaimed in a slightly nettled tone, "Why, my dear, what _is_ the matter?"