Puzzled by a shopkeeper’s refusal to sell him, on sight, a full pound of arsenic

[at 14, Roosevelt was] puzzled by a shopkeeper’s refusal to sell him, on sight, a full pound of arsenic. “I was informed that I must bring a witness to prove that I was not going to commit murder, suicide or any such dreadful thing, before I could have it!”

E. Morris, The rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979), 37