ROOSEVELT’S BIRTH AND EDUCATION. 
55 
balanced by impulsiveness in action or obstinacy in adhering to 
bis own ideas. He was certainly regarded as a man of unusually 
good fighting qualities, of determination, pluck and tenacity. 
“ If his classmates had been asked in their senior year to pick 
out the one member of the class who would be best adapted for 
such a service which he rendered with the Rough Riders in Cuba 
I think that, almost with one voice, they would have named 
Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt is in many respects as broad and 
typical an American as the country has produced.” 
ORIGINAL AND SELF-RELIANT. 
Both his fellows and his teachers say that he was much above 
the average as a student. He was just as original, just as reliant 
on his own judgment as he is now. In a mere matter of opinion 
or of dogma he had no respect for an instructor’s say-so above his 
own convictions, and some of his contemporaries in college recall 
with smiles some very strenuous discussions with teachers in which 
he was involved by his habit of defending his own convictions. 
At graduation he was one of the comparatively few who took 
honors, his subject being natural history. When young Roose¬ 
velt entered college he developed the taste for hunting and 
natural history which has since led him so often and so far through 
field and forest. His rifle and his hunting kit were the most con¬ 
spicuous things in his room. His birds he mounted himself. 
Live turtles and insects were always to be found in his study, 
and one who lived in the house with him at the time recalls well 
the excitement caused by a particularly large turtle sent by a 
friend from the southern seas, which got out of its box one night 
and started for the bathroom in search for water. Although well 
toward the top as a student he still had his full share of the gay 
rout that whiles dull care away. In his sophomore year he was 
one of the forty men in his class who belong to the Institute of 1770. 
In his senior year he was a member of the Porcelain, the 
Alpha Delta Phi, and the Hasty Pudding Clubs, being secretary 
of the last named. In the society of Boston he was often seen. 
Roosevelt’s membership in clubs other than social shows 
