Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/157

 to be picked up at random. Old sailors have a saying that when a seaman becomes unfit to go aloft any more, he ships as a cook; and quite as little regard for professional training and experience was shown aboard the good ship Harvard. Among the early despots of the kitchen, one had formerly been a locksmith, one had been bred a saddler, and two had followed the inglorious calling of tailors. So late as 1765 the appropriation for the whole culinary staff was only £37½ sterling per annum. Well might the hard-pressed students echo Garrick’s epigram—“God sends meat, and the Devil sends cooks.”

As a further measure of economy, the cook’s assistant or general scullion was sometimes an Indian impressed from the surrounding forest—whose interests probably lay more with scalps than with skillets, and whose views might be thought unconventional as to the best use of a slow fire—but more often an African slave. Of the latter genus, the names of “Mungo” Russell, who