The muscles of his legs were not as hard as he desired them to be and so he set himself to jumping a rope like a girl. He did this with so much enthusiasm that hundreds of boys in all the classes got ropes and started jumping.

There was something about the young student that was spectacular, that made people look at him and see what he was about. They wanted to see him when he boxed and they watched him jump the rope. They looked at the red and blue athletic stockings which he wore, and because the boys did make fun and demand that he take them off, he the more persistently wore them. The whole college knew about the stuffed birds and game he had killed, which decorated his apartment. They followed him with their eye when on his favorite horse he dashed through the streets of Cambridge and along the country roads. He was in the search of health as well as in the enjoyment of sport in his boxing. He was in search of health and for scientific knowledge in his trips on horseback and on foot. Yet whatever he did, and wherever he went, he was the object of attention and of deep interest. This was one of his most marked characteristics which accompanied him throughout his life.

He was exceedingly fond of college politics and was successful at the game, and had there an excellent start in the great lifework which he followed. He was also interested in the politics of the nation. In a heated campaign, the members of his class who were Republicans went over in a body to Boston to join in a parade. They carried torchlights and were enthusiastic as all college boys are. As they passed a certain house, a man of opposite political opinion, sitting in the second-story window laughed and jeered at the boys, and he backed up his opposition by throwing a

raw potato at the men in the line. Theodore Roosevelt rushed out of the line, laid down his torch, shook his fist at the man in the window and dared him to come down on the pavement and settle the matter on the spot. It is said that the man did not come down, that the taunts ceased and that no more potatoes were wasted. This indignation at an insult, this challenge to settle wrong-doing in a summary manner, though tempered by tact and experience, as the years passed, was one of the things that characterized him always and was an element of his greatness.

Perhaps the strongest mark that Harvard left on him was the social one. The fashionable set of Harvard and Boston was a complete change from his almost hermit life at his old home on 20th Street. But his home training had prepared him well for the social life of Harvard in preparation for the great wide world which was to receive him and of which he was to form so important a part. This son of wealth and aristocracy was immediately given a place in the influential social circles at Harvard and in Boston. He rode and drove a fast horse; he had a fancy high trap; he knew the rules of good breeding; he had to dress up for dinner at home from the time he was a boy, and knew exactly what to do in this elegant, influential social circle. It did not spoil him, as it does many young men, but aided largely in making him, in giving him social contact with the best people, a broader vision of life and a new set of enjoyments. The social life he made his servant and not his master, for he kept up his hard reading, his scientific investigation and his literary work besides. Some of these sons of splendid families who were in Harvard at the same time he was, and with whom he had such intimate social intercourse, became his friends for

life. He mentioned the names of some of them to me as having been not only as dear to him as though they had been his own kin but also among the strongest instruments in his political promotion.

It seems like a paradox that this smart, rich man's son, with his fashionable equipment, his sporting habits, his posing as a prize-fighter and a star dancer, should be found teaching a Sunday school class, and a mission class at that. But the old house on 20th Street' had gotten in its work on him so thoroughly that it was the perfectly natural thing for him to be regular in his attendance upon church, devoted in his religious habits and engaged particularly in saving the souls of poor children. He was all through his life a paradox. The paradox is only a seeming contradiction and not a real one, so that the gay, young, rich sport at Harvard and the teacher in the mission school were not opposite at all, but the natural life of the one person. We doubt whether in all American life there ever appeared such a paradox as he. From the beginning to the end, his life was full of apparent contradictions, which were not so at all, but in harmony with the same character, spectacular as

ever.

There is this incident connected with young Roosevelt's teaching of the mission class. He had quite a scene in the school. It seems that a boy named Joe came into the class one Sunday with a black eye. The teacher naturally asked him how he got it. He told him that a boy had pinched his sister in Sunday school and that he had given the boy a good licking, but had himself got the black eye in the encounter. The teacher said, "You did exactly right. Here's a dollar I want you to take, as a mark of my appreciation of your courage in defending your sister." The

mission class belonged to a high Episcopal church and the Sunday school authorities were rather shocked by this militant teacher of theirs. They were afraid that the doctrine he preached was rather too strenuous; besides, the young Harvard student got tangled in the ritual service at times and, altogether, both the officers and the young teacher thought it would be just as well for him to offer his services to another Sunday school. So he took up a class in a Congregational mission Sunday school and remained an intensely popular and efficient teacher till the day of his graduation.

Mr. Roosevelt was very fond of his Alma Mater. President Roosevelt made an address at a Commencement dinner at Cambridge, June 25th, 1902. He said, "It was my great good fortune five years ago to serve under your President, the then Secretary of the Navy, ex-Governor Long, and by a strange turn of the wheel of fate he served in my Cabinet as long as he would consent to serve, and then I had to replace him by another Harvard man! I have been fortunate in being associated with Senator Hoar, and I should indeed think ill of myself if I had not learned something from association with a man who possesses that fine and noble belief in mankind, the lack of which forbids healthy effort to do good in a democracy like ours. I have another fellow Harvard man to speak of to-day, and it is necessary to paraphrase an old saying in order to state the bald truth, that it is indeed a liberal education in high-minded statesmanship to sit at the same council table with John Hay.”

Mr. Roosevelt's devotion to Harvard is illustrated by this story. It seems that some United States Senator had called on the President on an important matter. He waited for some time for his turn and asked

the doorkeeper if he would not tell Mr. Roosevelt that he was there and would like to have an audience with him, which had been made by appointment. The man came back with the report that he would see him presently. There was another wait of some minutes and the Senator rather impatiently sent the doorkeeper in to insist that immediate attention be given to him. The man came back with the answer that the President said he was so busy receiving a call from the Harvard Baseball Club that the small matter of senatorial business would have to wait a few minutes. And he told a friend afterward that people ought to have better sense than to call on him at a time when the Harvard boys were making a visit.

Much as he loved Harvard, he did not hesitate while in college, and after he left it, to say some very plain things about some things he thought could be improved upon.

Theodore's father had talked to him so much about the necessity of depending upon himself, to work for a living, that he supposed he wanted him to follow his own career as a business man and perhaps in connection with his father's firm on Maiden Lane. But the appeal of God through nature to him in his boyhood still sounded in his ears while in college and with compelling force. He felt deep down in the bottom of his heart that he preferred to be a naturalist and determined that he would be such if his father should give his consent. This was while he was a freshman at Harvard and in an intimate talk with his father he revealed his deep desire and asked his father's consent that he should give himself up to natural science and prepare himself for a professorship in some university. His father gave his consent and at the same time told him that he would leave him money