During his youth his physical handicap had rather cut him off
from companionship on equal terms with his fellows. Now, however,
he could enter with zest in their sports and societies. At the
very beginning of his Freshman year he showed his classmates his
mettle. During the presidential torchlight parade when the
jubilant Freshmen were marching for Hayes, some Tilden man
shouted derisively at them from a second-story window and pelted
them with potatoes. It was impossible for them to get at him, but
Theodore, who was always stung at any display of meanness-- and
it was certainly mean to attack the paraders when they could not
retaliate--stood out from the line and shook his fist at the
assailant. His fellow marchers asked who their champion was, and
so the name of Roosevelt and his pugnacious little figure became
generally known to them. He was little then, not above five feet
six in height, and under one hundred and thirty pounds in weight.
By degrees they all knew him. His unusual ways, his loyalty to
his hobbies, which he treated not as mere whims but as being
worthy of serious application, his versatility, his
outspokenness, his almost unbroken good-nature, attracted most of
the persons with whom he came in contact. He rose to be President
of the Natural History Society, a distinction which implied some
real merit in its possessor. His family antecedents, but still
more his personal qualities, made easy for him the ascent of the
social terraces at Harvard--the Dicky, the Hasty Pudding Club,
and the Porcellian. He was editor of the Harvard Advocate, which
opened the door of the O.K. Society, where he found congenial
intellectual companionship with the editors from the classes
above and below him; and when Dr. Edward Everett Hale wished to