creeping up the incline of the floor, was licking his throat. By this time Noonan had managed to wrench himself free from the ruins, and he and Berquist now turned their attention to Skrine. They slitted his boot down the leg with an ax. Then Skrine planted his uninjured foot on a timber, so that he could push, and gave an arm to each of them. They braced themselves, and Skrine himself gave the word to pull. His foot came from under the joist with the sharp snap of a loosened ankle. Skrine dragged himself painfully around the confines of their niche in the ruins. The fallen timbers formed an immovable arch above them, with no opening avenue of escape. Below them the water was creeping up, and over them the fire was creeping down. Al ready the smoke was so dense and suffocating that they gasped and choked, with their faces held close to the floor. And yet Skrine saw a single desperate chance of escape. He crept as high up on the slanting floor as the ruins would permit, and Noonan passed him an ax. Skrine crouched on his knees, and began with swift, powerful strokes to chop a hole through the floor in the forlorn hope that some outlet of refuge might be found in the other part of the basement. The water continued to pour into the basement from a dozen hose-leads. By straining hard, Hall lifted his head the width of a finger higher, but the creeping water still lapped his chin. Again Nelson wrenched desperately at the timbers above him. "It's no use, boys," Hall said, calmly. A moment later, Skrine heard a sudden sharp gasp. When he turned to look, he saw Nelson holding the lantern significantly over the pool. Hall had disappeared. Berquist, who had been crouching on the floor, shook from head to foot as with a chill. Suddenly he leaped to his knees and began to tear frantically at the ruins with his bare hands. Skrine shouted at him, fearing that he might dislodge the rubbish and bring it down upon them. Berquist was one of the pluckiest men on the force, but he could not stand the awful strain of waiting for the inexorable, creeping death which had come to Hall. It was the ungovernable terror of a man penned. Skrine seized Berquist's shoulders with a grip of iron, and bore him backward to the floor. "Thith won't do, Berquith," he drawled, lisping, and he choked him until his eyes bulged. ax. Then he let Berquist up and gave him the With something to do, Berquist became a fireman again-cool, determined, and brave -and the chips flew from the tough floor. It seemed hours to them that they lay there on the slippery slant of the floor. They were drenched and numbed, the smoke ate their eyes and burned and griped in their throats, and yet each pecked away until he was too dizzy and weak to see, and then he passed the ax to his neighbor. And the water crept higher and higher. Before the hole was well through, Noonan, weak with pain and half suffocated, fell limp and unconscious. Skrine pushed him to one side without a word, and went on furiously with the chopping. Berquist went down next, and Nelson succumbed just as he was ready to crawl through the hole, which was now completed. Skrine's head was splitting with pain, his burning eyes could hardly see the dim glimmer of the lantern, and his legs were numb with cold and pain, but he set his teeth and dragged himself through the hole. In the other part of the basement the water was over two feet deep, but the air was better. Skrine turned, and dragged Nelson's limp body out through the hole and propped it on a pile of boxes. Then he returned for Noonan and Berquist. He knew that the basement was filling rapidly and that unless they escaped at once all their work would go for nothing. Skrine reeled like a drunken man, and at every step his crushed foot pained him terribly. But he seized Noonan and Nelson, and hobbled with them toward the front of the building. He held the lantern in his teeth. At last he saw the faint glimmer from a basement window. He shouted again and again, but in the pandemonium of roaring fire and rushing water no one heard him. He held up his lantern, and waved it around his head. A lieutenant and two men, running to see what caused the light in the window, heard some one call faintly. They scrambled into the basement, and rolled Nelson and Noonan out like logs. Skrine held back, mumbling and pointing; and they went for Berquist. McCaffrey, bending over Skrine, heard him say: "Blarmed thmoky in that hole." A board of control passed resolutions, and had them engrossed, suitable for framing and hanging on the wall. Skrine, not being accustomed to such things, stowed them away in the depths of a tarpaulin lockerwhich was like Skrine. THEODORE ROOSEVELT. A CHARACTER SKETCH. BY RAY STANNARD BAKER. EARLY a year before the was expected. Moreover, it was at Mr. "To be prepared for war is the most effectual means to promote peace." 66 Before the Maine was blown up in Havana harbor, Mr. Roosevelt said to a friend in New York: "We shall be compelled to fight Spain within a year." "If it had not been for Roosevelt," said Senator Cushman K. Davis, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, we should not have been able to strike the blow that we did at Manila. It needed just Roosevelt's energy and promptness." 66 Mr. Roosevelt called it "sharpening the tools for the navy;" and when they were sharpened and the American flag was firmly planted on Cavité, he resigned. "There is nothing more for me to do It was this sense of the great need of here," he said. "I've got to get into military readiness, whether to prevent war the fight myself." the United States urged Mr. Roosevelt to remain at Washington. They told him that he was just the man for the place, and they warned him that he was "ruining his career." They said that there were plenty of men to stop bullets, but very few who could manage a navy. or to maintain war, coupled with a keen Nearly every newspaper of importance in appreciation of the impending danger, that induced Mr. Roosevelt to leave the fierce hurly-burly of the New York Police Department, in which he joyed, for the obscure, red-taped Assistant Secretaryship of the Navy. He knew that it was a position lacking in advisory importance and that there was slight possibility of its yielding public credit or political preferment. It was merely the king-cog of a vast machine, the function of which was to keep the American navy in readiness for hostilities. When Mr. Roosevelt was appointed, his first work was to familiarize himself with the possible needs of the navy in the event of war. After that, he began to buy guns, ammunition, and provisions. He insisted on more extended gunnery practice. He hurried the work on the new war ships, and ordered repairs on the old ones; he directed that the crew of every ship be recruited to its full strength; he crammed the bins of every naval supply station with coal. Consequently, when Admiral Dewey arrived at Hong Kong with the fleet which was to win the greatest victory of the war, he found quantities of coal, ammunition, and supplies awaiting him, so that he could advance without delay and offer battle before he It is characteristic of Mr. Roosevelt that when he sees a duty clearly, no advice, however well meant, nor any question of expediency or profit or future favor will turn him by the width of a hair. His career never for a moment eclipses his sense of responsibility. Somewhere he says in one of his essays: "One plain duty of every man is to face the future as he faces the present, regardless of what it may have in store for him, and turning toward the light as he sees the light, to play his part manfully, as a man among men." This sterling, rugged, old-fashioned sense of duty is the key-note of Mr. Roosevelt's character that, and the iron determination to do his duty promptly when he sees it. So he became a lieutenant-colonel of volunteers, one among several hundred. He fared with his regiment on three battlefields, where he was the stout heart of the whole army; and when the fighting was over, it was he who first saw the impending danger of Cuban fever, and his prompt and forcible appeal for instant removal of the troops undoubtedly saved the lives of thousands of American soldiers. When he returned from Cuba last August, it was to find himself the most popular man in the army, if not in the nation. And who will say now that he was mistaken in leaving the Navy Department and riding away to the front with his cowboys and college men? These episodes furnish the cipher key by which all of Mr. Roosevelt's life may be read. The qualities which made them a possibility are only the flowering of a long period of strenuous development, extending backward through many generations. HIS ANCESTORS. During the Civil War, Mr. Roosevelt's father, also Theodore Roosevelt, was one of the most prominent citizens of New York. Men who still live remember him as he rode through the park-a slim, straight, handsome-featured man, who sat his horse as though born to the saddle. He had great strength and nobility of character, combined with a certain easy joyousness of disposition. To him, more than to any other man, New York owes it system of newsboys' lodging houses. He was a power in the Young Men's Christian Association, and one of the principal organizers of the Bureau of United Charities. During the Civil War, he established the famous and useful "Allotment Commission," which enabled soldiers in the field to allot and send to their families at home a certain portion of their monthly pay. He held various positions of public trust, but such was his high standard of the duty of the citizen to the state that he never would accept any payment for his services. Mingled with this fine old Dutch blood, which so strongly marks the personality of Mr. Roosevelt, there are strains in the family of the best Scotch, Irish, and French Huguenot, so that if there be an aristocracy of blood in America, the Roosevelts may lay claim to it. But like every true aristocrat, Mr. Roosevelt is also the simplest of democrats. Mr. Roosevelt's mother was Miss Martha Bulloch. She came from the old Southern family of Bullochs which produced a noted governor of Georgia and the builder of the Confederate privateer" Alabama.” BOYHOOD LIFE. Mr. Roosevelt was born in the family mansion at 28 East Twentieth Street, New York, on October 27, 1858, so that he is now just forty years old. As a young boy he was thin-shanked, pale, and delicate, giving little promise of the amazing vigor of his later life. To avoid the rough treatment of the public school, he was tutored at home, also attending a private school for a timeCutler's, one of the most famous of its day. Most of his summers were spent at the Roosevelt farm near Oyster Bay, then almost as distant in time from New York as the Adirondacks now are. For many years he was slow to learn and not strong enough to join in the play of other boys; but as he grew older he saw that if he ever amounted to anything he must acquire vigor of body. With characteristic energy he set about developing himself. He swam, he rode, he ran; he tramped the hills back of the bay, for pastime studying and cataloguing the birds native to his neighborhood; and thus he laid the foundation of that incomparable physical vigor from which rose his future prowess as a ranchman and hunter. "I was determined," he says, "to make a man of myself." I spoke to him about being a city boy. "I belong as much to the country as to the city," he replied; "I owe all my vigor to the country." Behind the elder Theodore Roosevelt stretched eight generations of patriotic Americans, burghers and patroons of New York since the time of one-legged Peter Stuyvesant. And the various generations have had their aldermen, their assemblymen, The elder Roosevelt knew the science of their judges, their congressmen, their sol- bringing up boys. It may be summed up in diers. In Revolutionary times, New York a single word-work, plenty of work, hard chose a Roosevelt to act with Alexander work. Although the family was considHamilton in the United States Constitutional ered wealthy, he taught his boys there Convention. Roosevelt Street in New York were two of them and two girls-that the City is so named because it was a cow-lane most despicable of created beings is the man in the original Roosevelt farm; Roosevelt who does nothing. He himself was a proHospital was the gift of a recent member of digious worker in many different lines. the family. Young Roosevelt had few dreams, he action and heat of public conflict. His reading was of a nature to spur him on to deeds, for he is preeminently a man whom history has lifted. Even in his college days he had been a close student of the "Federalist," which he calls " the greatest book of its kind ever written." Indeed, no young American of the time was more thoroughly familiar with the history of his country, both east and west, and with the lives of its greatest men, than Mr. Roosevelt. He had studied its COLONEL THEODORE ROOSEVELT. From a recent copyrighted photograph by Rockwood. on politics as well as its wars, and he knew every one of the noble principles which it was founded. Before he was twenty-three he had begun work on his "Naval War of 1812,' which has since become the standard authority on that period of the nation's history, with a copy in the library of every American war ship. In his essay on "American Ideals," one of the richest tributes to patriotism in the language, he burns incense to the inspiration of history. "Each of us who reads the Gettysburg speech," he of the greatest American of the nineteenth century, or who studies the long campaigns and lofty statesmanship of that other American who was even greater, cannot but feel within him that lift toward things higher and nobler which can never be bestowed by the enjoyment of material prosperity." turned to New York, ready to begin his life writes, "or the second inaugural address work. He was now barely twenty-three years old, a robust, sturdy-shouldered, square-jawed young man, born a fighter. He had no need to work; his income was ample to keep him in comfort, even luxury, all his life. He might spend his summers in Newport and his winters on the Continent, and possibly win some fame as an amateur athlete and a society man; and no one would think of blaming him, nor of asking more than he gave. But he craved the stir and Here was an American stung to action by the deeds of the two greatest Americans. He believed in them as models, and he felt |