Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/138

 “prayer time,” for which candles were charged “proportionably upon every scholar who retaineth his seat in the buttery.” Later it was simply handed out at the kitchen door, and frequently eaten on the spot.

To supplement the skimpiness of such fare, there long flourished the ancient university custom of “bevers” (from the same root as beverage)—a sort of light lunch or cold snack between meals, also served from the buttery. “Morning bevers” gradually merged into breakfast, which came to be served quite late, after chapel and a recitation or two. “Afternoon bevers” seems to have been the forerunner of the British five o’clock tea, and like that solemn function demanded a complete cessation of all other exercises for half an hour.

The Anglican practice of issuing meals from the buttery, awkward enough under a range of connected buildings in the mild climate of the old world, was horribly inconvenient in the new. The wretched freshman, half awake, stumbling through the snowy Yard in the gray of a piercing winter dawn, bearing a bowl of fast-congealing coffee, and subject to the onslaughts of upper classmen or a misstep on the ice, counted himself thrice happy if he regained his frigid chamber with even the