When he entered Harvard College in the class of '77, which has gone down to fame as the most brilliant (and disorderly) class that ever was, he was only sixteen, but quite old for his age. Just as at school, he treated all his classmates alike, without regard to what team or what society they were on, never himself belonging to any particular set or clique, but to the class at large, where he was universally known and liked. He kept up his studies only fairly well, as the prescribed courses did not interest him; but in the electives, where he chose history and political economy, he reached such high marks that his general average kept him in the first quarter of his class, and he did a great deal of independent reading along his favorite lines of study that was not counted in marks, but, nevertheless, was of the greatest service to him.
In the social life of the class he went along with the rest, without particular eminence, belonging to the "Institute," the "Dickey," and the "Hasty Pudding Club," whose initiations which were then quite elaborate he survived; the men who were "running" him, and calling out to him to "hit 'er up" when he was speeding through the Yard for them, little guessing whom they were ordering about. He kept up his athletics, and played half-back on the Harvard football team against Yale and All-Canada in the days when they played fifteen on a side, and Harvard teams won the games as much as a matter of course as Yale teams do nowadays. Young Russell's athletics made him quite a "horrible example" for parents to hold up, for before he was through college he had twice fractured his arm skating and coasting, broken a finger at baseball, and his nose at football; but his athletics had also given him a sound and sinewy body which has kept him in such good health that he has been able to undertake tasks such as no one else has ever attempted--as, for instance, when he travelled the length of Cape Cod and spoke to twenty different audiences in the same day, and to most of them from the steps of a car. So he is still devoted to athletics in spite of all his accidents, and is an enthusiastic wearer of the crimson at all its great games in spite of its recent ill-success.