Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/313

 its use by the moot courts on several afternoons of each week—and even by real courts. For Judge Story, conceiving that it would be an inspiration to members of the bar to be surrounded with the works of their great forerunners, and an equal inspiration to the students to get a glimpse of actual court work, inaugurated the practice of bodily transporting the then pliable forum in “jury-waived” cases from Boston to Cambridge, and planting it, totam curiam, in the Law School library. The room must have been, indeed, a decidedly uncomfortable studying place. The greatest indecorum of our modern reading-room is to work in shirt-sleeves; but the simplicity of those days thought nothing of the almost universal “chaw” of tobacco, and what is worse, if I may be pardoned a legal phrase, provided no receivers for the ensuing liquidation.

Cleaning anything was apparently the last idea of the janitor. That functionary, for a generation or more, was an original genius named Sweetman. Born in Ireland, and bred for a parish priest, he had come to this country and fallen upon evil days, being glad to get a job at street digging. President Quincy, passing one day, was amazed at a red head emerging from a trench and quoting, in excellent Latin, the lines from the Bucolics concerning the pleasures of the husbandman. He took the orator into his own service, but finding him perhaps too