Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/334



Yet the Doctor’s encouraging prophecy (which was inspired by the fact that he was trying to sell the government some of his adjacent land) was hardly fulfilled. For many years thereafter the chief fame of the arsenal was among the undergraduates of Harvard College, who regarded it in the somewhat unique light of a cannonball mine. No military historian has been able to compute the number of Revolutionary eighteen- and twenty-four-pounders that ended their ci-devant martial careers by an ignominious nocturnal abstraction from their flimsy store-sheds and a precarious existence as transmittenda in the rooms of irrepressible youth. In theory they were useful to heat in the study fire, and then to transfer to a cold bed-room to mollify its arctic temperature. In practice they were invaluable for rolling along corridors or bouncing down stairs in the night watches, for dropping unexpectedly out of window by day, and for other delicious variations of the academic routine. But at about the time of the discovery of gold in California, this ferrous vein of humor seems to have been nearly worked out.