The Rough Riders didn't make him an honorary member of
their regiment just because he was charming and a faithful
friend, but largely because they were a lot of daredevils and
he was another.
To hear him talk you wouldn't have thought that he had ever
done a brave thing in his life. He talked a great deal, and
he talked even better than he wrote (at his best he wrote like
an angel), but I have dusted every corner of my memory and
cannot recall any story of his in which he played a heroic or
successful part. Always he was running at top speed, or
hiding behind a tree, or lying face down in a foot of water
(for hours!) so as not to be seen. Always he was getting the
worst of it. But about the other fellows he told the whole
truth with lightning flashes of wit and character building and
admiration or contempt. Until the invention of moving
pictures the world had nothing in the least like his talk.
His eye had photographed, his mind had developed and prepared
the slides, his words sent the light through them, and lo and
behold, they were reproduced on the screen of your own mind,
exact in drawing and color. With the written word or the
spoken word he was the greatest recorder and reporter of
things that he had seen of any man, perhaps, that ever lived.
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