When I got back to America, at the age of fifteen, I began serious study to enter Harvard under Mr. Arthur Cutler, who later founded the Cutler School in New York.  I could not go to school because I knew so much less than most boys of my age in some subjects and so much more in others.  In science and history and geography and in unexpected parts of German and French I was strong, but lamentably weak in Latin and Greek and mathematics.  My grandfather had made his summer home in Oyster Bay a number of years before, and my father now made Oyster Bay the summer home of his family also.  Along with my college preparatory studies I carried on the work of a practical student of natural history.  I worked with greater industry than either intelligence or success, and made very few additions to the sum of human knowledge; but to this day certain obscure ornithological publications may be found in which are recorded such items as, for instance, that on one occasion a fish-crow, and on another an Ipswich sparrow, were obtained by one Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., at Oyster Bay, on the shore of Long Island Sound.

In the fall of 1876 I entered Harvard, graduating in 1880.  I thoroughly enjoyed Harvard, and I am sure it did me good, but only in the general effect, for there was very little in my actual studies which helped me in after life.  More than one of my own sons have already profited by their friendship with certain of their masters in school or college.  I certainly profited by my friendship with one of my tutors, Mr. Cutler; and in Harvard I owed much to the professor of English, Mr. A. S. Hill.  Doubtless through my own fault, I saw almost nothing of President Eliot and very little of the professors.  I ought to have gained much more than I did gain from writing the themes and forensics.  My failure to do so may have been partly due to my taking no interest in the subjects.  Before I left Harvard I was already writing one or two chapters of a book I afterwards published on the Naval War of 1812.  Those chapters were so dry that they would have made a dictionary seem light reading by comparison.  Still, they represented purpose and serious interest on my part, not the perfunctory effort to do well enough to get a certain mark; and corrections of them by a skilled older man would have impressed me and have commanded my respectful attention.  But I was not sufficiently developed to make myself take an intelligent interest in some of the subjects assigned me—­the character of the Gracchi, for instance.  A very clever and studious lad would no doubt have done so, but I personally did not grow up to this particular subject until a good many years later.  The frigate and sloop actions between the American and British sea-tigers of 1812 were much more within my grasp.  I worked drearily at the Gracchi because I had to; my conscientious and much-to-be-pitied professor dragging me through the theme by main strength, with my feet firmly planted in dull and totally idea-proof resistance.