Leonard Wood's son, I found, attributed the paternity of all of those not of his own family to me.
Once we were taking the children across Rock Creek on a fallen tree.
I was standing on the middle of the log trying to prevent any of the children from falling off, and while making a clutch at one peculiarly active and heedless child I fell off myself.

As I emerged from the water I heard the little Wood boy calling frantically to the General: "Oh! oh! The father of all the children fell into the creek!"-- which made me feel like an uncommonly moist patriarch.

Of course the children took much interest in the trophies I occasionally brought back from my hunts.

When I started for my regiment, in '98, the stress of leaving home, which was naturally not pleasant, was somewhat lightened by the next to the youngest boy, whose ideas of what was about to happen were hazy, clasping me round the legs with a beaming smile and saying, "And is my father going to the war?
And will he bring me back a bear ?" When, some five months later, I returned, of course in my uniform, this little boy was much puzzled as to my identity, although he greeted me affably with "Good afternoon, Colonel." Half an hour later somebody asked him, "Where's father ?" to which he responded, "I don't know; but the Colonel is taking a bath." Of course the children anthropomorphized--if that is the proper term--their friends of the animal world.

Among these friends at one period was the baker's horse, and on a very rainy day I heard the little girl, who was looking out of the window, say, with a melancholy shake of her head, "Oh! there's poor Kraft's horse, all soppin' wet!" While I was in the White House the youngest boy became an _habitue_ of a small and rather noisome animal shop, and the good-natured owner would occasionally let him take pets home to play with.