Waterbury evening Democrat., 1903-12-26
.ROOSEvELT'S
 COLLEGE DAYS.
Presidents Career at Harvard
 Described by Jacob Riis.
INSTANCES OF HIS sTRENUosITY.

Boxing Boats With Fellow Students,
 Says the Author, Proved Him a
 Vigorous Athlete-Hovv He Beat a
 Man With a Reputation as Eight
 er-sl1fpDfag the Rope One of His
 Exercises.
 Tcopyright 1903, by the Outlook Com
 pany.]
 "He became instantly favorfte with his class of one hundred and seventy odd" says Jacob Riis in the Outlook. writing about Theodore Roosevelt's career at Harvard.
 "They laughed at his oddities, at his unrepressed enthusiasm, at his liking for Elizabethan poetry, voted him more or less crazy with true Harvard conservatism, respected him highly for his scholarship on the same solid ground and fell in even with his mo- tions for bis own sake, as afterward some of them fell in behind him in the rush up San Juan hill, leaving lives of elegance and ease to starve with him in the trenches and do the chores of a trooper in camp under a tropical sun.
 Ut is remembered that Theodore hoosevelt set Harvard to skipping the rope, a sport 1t had abandoned years before with knickerbockers, but it suit ed this student to keep up the exercise as a means of strengthening the leg muscles, and rope skipping became a pastime of the class of 80. In the gymnasium they wore red stockings with their practice suits. Roosevelt had happened upon pair that were striped a patriotic red and white, and he wore them, at first to the amaze ment of the other students, He did not even know that they had attracted attention, but when some one told him he laughed and kept them on. It was what the legs could do in the stockings he was there to find out.
 Twenty years after heard a police man call him dude when he walked up the steps of police headquarters. New York, with silk sash about his waist, something no man had been known to wear in Mulberry street in the memory of the oldest there, and I saw the same officer looking after him down the street as long as he was in sight the day he went and turn back with a sigh that made him my friend forever, There won't such another come through that door again in my time, that there won't And there did not. The old man is retired long since,
 ''He joined the exclusive Pork club f4f, aJ1 I,o xy<a1 traditions and made the Porcellian blood run cold by taking his fiancee to luncheon where no woman ever trod before. He simply saw no reason why a. lady. should not lunch at a gentle mems club, and when the shocked baeh- elor minds of the Pork club searched the horizon for one to confront him with they discovered that there was none. Accordingly the world still stood, and so did the college.
 He played polo, did athletic stunts with the fellows and dreve two wheeled gig badly, having no end of good times in it, When he put on the boxing gloves he hailed the first conner with the more delight if he happened to be the champion of the class, who was twice his size and heft. The pom- meling that ensued he took with the most hearty good will, and, though his nose bled and his glasses fell off, put ting him at disadvantage, he refused grimly to cry quarter and pressed the fight home in way that always re. ! minds me of that redoubtable Danish sea fighter, Peter Tordenskjold, who kept up the fight, firing pewter dinner plates and mugs from his one gun, when on his little smack there was left but single man of the crew, and he wept.' Tordenskjold killed the captain of the Swedish frigate with enc of his l mugs and got away. Roosevelt was bested in his boxing matches often enough; but, however superior, his op- ponents bore away always the impres- sion that they had faced fighter.
 ''But the battle was not always to the strong in those days. have heard a story of how Roosevelt beat man with a reputation as fighter, but not, l it would appear, with the instincts of a gentleman. I shall not vouch for it, 1 for have not asked him about it. But 1 it is typical enough to be true except l for the wonder now the fellow got in 1 there. He took, so the story runs, a | mean advantage and struck a blow.