Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/184

 spirits were dismissed, the rest apologized, and a semblance of discipline was restored—but Commons were soon as bad as ever!

As in other rebellions of this period, each side sought to justify itself before the public—which was assumed to have a burning interest in the matter—by leaping into print. Joseph Tufts, the first scholar in the senior class, and hence the most influential undergraduate, published (in Boston) on April 13, “Don Quixots [sic] at College, or a History of the Gallant Adventures lately achieved by the Combined Students of Harvard University; Interspeded with some Facetious Reasonings.” This pamphlet contains some excellent fooling. On April 11, it states, at the end of the first week allowed by the Faculty for signing the apology, the scholars gathered at 20 Stoughton, and a score of them swore “to sign no governmental paper whatever.” A few of these heroes subsequently gave in; whereupon their leader was so affected that the next night he wandered into the adjacent graveyard and “stood upon a tomb, and thought that if he was on a bridge he should leap into the river.”

Only three days after this skit, the Faculty issued a solemn counterblast, entitled “Narrative of the Proceedings of the Corporation of Harvard College, relative to