Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/118

 its parts (except a chapel). Especially, the painstaking accuracy with which they embodied in this little building the whole layout of the traditional dining system is amazing. Dunster in his “Orders” specifies: “To the butler belongs the cellar and butteries, and all from thenceforward to the furthest end of the Hall, with the south porch; to the cook the kitchen, larder, and the way leading to his hatch, the turret, and the north alley unto the walk.” The important adjunct of the brew-house probably stood close by, as it certainly did in later days. Dunster mentions “the brewer” along with “the baker.” Our fathers, we may observe, closely associated the thirst for learning and that for beer; at the 1703 Commencement the few graduates present absorbed no less than fourteen barrels. Had the parching sirocco of Prohibition arisen earlier, drying up the very sap of erudition—but the academic mind turns away in horror.

All these details of dining equipment were repeated, on a larger scale, in the first Harvard Hall, completed in 1682, and when that was burned in 1764, still more amply in the second, and so continued up to the nineteenth century. In fact, the elaborate system of English Commons could hardly have been administered without