AN UPSTART VILLAGE.

North Otago Times, 21 October 1905, Page 1

AN UPSTART VILLAGE.

j 1 Since Theodore Roosevelt lias been I President of the United States, Oyster. Bay, a small village on the coast of Long Island, which in summer is a quiet seaside resort, and in winter is as somnolent as Sleepy Hollow, has sprung from obscurity into the full: glare of the public gaze. It figures | on the latest maps—quite a newj honour—merely because it is the near-1 est telegraph station !o President 1 Roosevelt's summer home, five miles away, and because the President alights at the dingy station there when he retires from Washington and discards for a short holiday period some of the cares of his trying office. Oyster Bay is what an American would call a place of no account, Its chief industry is the rearing of oysters, and its best attractions are its leach and its opportunities for good fishing and bathing. It has three or four hundred houses—straggling and detached, as though they were unneighbourly and not on friendly terms with each other, The village is about an hour's railway ride from New Yorlr, situated on a small inlet of Long Island Sound, by which it is separated from New York. President Roosevelt's house is five miles away on Sagamore Hill, so named after the Indians who live on a reservation near by. It is a wooden structure, plain and unpretentious, with vine-clad verandas and a pleasing picturesqueness. It is a playhouse, and many of its walls and doors bear evidence of damage indicted by the "whirlwind" President's six boisterous children. Its interior is in keeping with its exterior—simple and unassuming; its chief adornments being trophies of its owner's hunting powers, such as buffalo and deer heads and bear skins. Guns and fishing-rods lie about in odd corners. The few acres of ground in the centre of which the house stands are open to the world, as there is no forbidding wall or hedge about it as would be the case with a similar place in England, In fact, if the house were situated in the best hunting country in England it would not rent for more than a year. It is here that President Roosevelt takes all the leisure that his energetic personality allows him, While lie is holiday-making he is living a strenuous life with his boys which many men would call hard work. He can be seen tramping about, wearing a straw hat a size or two 100 small for liiin, and yellow with age, and clothes which bear signs of long service and are not of fashiona le cut. Mr Roosevelt does not smoke. It is said of him that he once ventured to woo "My Lady Nicotine," and met with a rebuff that sickened him for all time, and he does not deny the impeachement, But visitors can always be sure of a splendid Havana, if their tastes incline that way, which the President manages to unearth from a hiding-place when occasion demands. The illustrious visitors in the persons of Peace Delegates from Russia and Japan had an insight into the mysteries and rigours of the simple life when they journeyed to Sagamore Hill, by way of Oyster Bay, to visit the President of the United States,