Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/146

 sword of authority seemed powerless to guard. As late as 1815 it was solemnly decreed that “the scholars must not go into the kitchen to cook.”

But a much more serious defect of the system began to manifest itself before long, and grew continually greater. If it was hard to keep the boys out of the kitchen, it was much harder to keep them “in Commons.” A strong repugnance to be herded together and forced to eat—or at any rate pay for—poor provender miserably prepared and served, while within easy reach of healthy and hearty family cooking, to say nothing of the epicurean delights of several excellent taverns, gradually caused an alarming defection from the hall, and an increasing tendency to “take one’s name out of the buttery.”

If this was forbidden, the half-starved “scholars” resorted to all sorts of illicit practices to eke out their subsistence. In 1672 the court records detail how Edward Pelham of the class of 1673, coming “with a fowling peece in his hand,” induced two small boys to shoot “a turkie sitting on Capt. Gookin’s fence,” and to convey it, wrapped in a coat, to Samuel Gibson’s, where it “was dressed by his wife, & baked in the oven, & in the night following it was eaten by Mr. Pelham, John Wise [1673] and Jonathan Russell [1675],