Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/149

 Careless of such “pecuniary mulcts,’’ which were simply added to the quarter-bills and paid (like the fines for drunkenness imposed by a modern police-court) not by the offenders but by their families, the hungry and dissatisfied students still sought to assuage the natural cravings of the inner man. Debarred from private houses, they patronized “the different marts of luxury, intemperance, and ruin,” as the Cambridge inns were officially stigmatized. When these in turn were banned, Charles Angier of 1793 conceived the ingenious substitute of a perpetual spread in his room at Hollis 8 (long remembered as “The Tavern”), where a table was kept constantly covered with tempting edibles and potables for “first aid” to the refugees. ‘We take upon us,” remarks John Holmes, “in the absence of historical evidence, to vouch for the constancy of Mr. Angier’s friends. The shrine is gone, but a flavor of transcendent hospitality will always pervade No. 8.”

The gentle reader of to-day may note with some surprise that during this prolonged contest to keep the scholars in Commons it seems never to have occurred to the authorities to resort to any weapon finer than the bludgeon of sheer compulsion. And yet they were only following the theory of pedagogics as they knew it. They were stern men, still overshadowed by the tradi-