Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/175

 grade of Commons at $2 a week, served in the basement of University Hall, which was dubbed “starvation hollow.” In the first grade there was meat every day, in the second, every other day, the lacunæ being filled with pudding, “compounded chiefly of bad rice.” Still, we have the word of no less a judge than Joseph H. Choate that this was a very tolerable arrangement. All the same, the number of survivors who agreed with him must have been insignificant; for the conscientious contractor soon disappeared, and Commons, as we have seen, ceased to exist.

If we pause to consider that the miserably inadequate dietary which has been sketched above—washed down with every variety of vile beer, cider as hard as Pharaoh’s heart, and (on the sly) heroic jorums of rum punch—was prescribed during four of their most critical years for rapidly growing youths, who took no regular exercise beyond the daily chores, who had no inkling of modern sanitation, and who never saw a tooth-brush in their lives, we can but feel a new awe and wonder in perusing the first fifty pages of the Quinquennial Catalogue—awe at their hardihood and wonder that they ever survived to take a degree. With quiet irony Dr. S. A. Eliot remarks: “There is reason to believe that the quality of the provisions in 1767 was not