Letters to His Children — 38. Novels and Games, Christmas Present To His Old Nurse
DEAR KERMIT:
I sympathize with every word you say in your letter, about Nicholas Nickleby, and about novels generally.
Normally I only care for a novel if the ending is good, and I quite agree with you that if the hero has to die he ought to die worthily and nobly, so that our sorrow at the tragedy shall be tempered with the joy and pride one always feels when a man does his duty well and bravely.
There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life, and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction.
As Police Commissioner it was my duty to deal with all kinds of squalid misery and hideous and unspeakable infamy, and I should have been worse than a coward if I had shrunk from doing what was necessary; but there would have been no use whatever in my reading novels detailing all this misery and squalor and crime, or at least in reading them as a steady thing.
Now and then there is a powerful but sad story which really is interesting and which really does good; but normally the books which do good and the books which healthy people find interesting are those which are not in the least of the sugar-candy variety, but which, while portraying foulness and suffering when they must be portrayed, yet have a joyous as well as a noble side.
We have had a very mild and open fall.
I have played tennis a good deal, the French Ambassador being now quite a steady playmate, as he and I play about alike; and I have ridden with Mother a great deal.
Last Monday when Mother had gone to New York I had Selous, the great African hunter, to spend the day and night.
He is a perfect old dear; just as simple and natural as can be and very interesting.
I took him, with Bob Bacon, Gifford Pinchot, Ambassador Meyer and Jim Garfield, for a good scramble and climb in the afternoon, and they all came to dinner afterwards.
Before we came down to dinner I got him to spend three-quarters of an hour in telling delightfully exciting lion and hyena stories to Ethel, Archie and Quentin.
He told them most vividly and so enthralled the little boys that the next evening I had to tell them a large number myself.
To-day is Quentin's birthday and he loved his gifts, perhaps most of all the weest, cunningest live pig you ever saw, presented him by Straus.
Phil Stewart and his wife and boy, Wolcott (who is Archie's age), spent a couple of nights here.
One afternoon we had hide-and-go-seek, bringing down Mr. Garfield and the Garfield boys, and Archie turning up with the entire football team, who took a day off for the special purpose.
We had obstacle races, hide-and-go-seek, blind-man's buff, and everything else;
and there were times when I felt that there was a perfect shoal of small boys bursting in every direction up and down stairs, and through and over every conceivable object.
Mother and I still walk around the grounds every day after breakfast.
The gardens, of course, are very, very dishevelled now, the snap-dragons holding out better than any other flowers.
CHRISTMAS PRESENT TO HIS OLD NURSE
(To Mrs. Dora Watkins) White House, December 19, 1905. DEAR DOLLY:
I wish you a merry Christmas, and want you to buy whatever you think you would like with the enclosed check for twenty dollars.
It is now just forty years since you stopped being my nurse, when I was a little boy of seven, just one year younger than Quentin now is.
I wish you could see the children play here in the White House grounds.
For the last three days there has been snow, and Archie and Quentin and their cousin, cunning little Sheffield Cowles, and their other cousin, Mr. John Elliott's little girl, Helena, who is a perfect little dear, have been having all kinds of romps in the snow--coasting, having snowball fights, and doing everything--in the grounds back of the White House.
This coming Saturday afternoon I have agreed to have a great play of hide-and-go-seek in the White House itself, not only with these children but with their various small friends.
