Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/347

 beer, and (possibly under its influence) made so free of little Sam Hough’s bed? Have we not here the first darkey “scout” of Harvard, progenitor of the whole tribe of college coons and great-grandfather of all Memorial Hall waiters? What fluky breeze of fortune wafted this dusky child of nature from a languorous coral strand to the grim confines of Calvinistic Cambridge? Were colored brethren already hanging round the Square looking for odd jobs ere that classic forum had become clearly distinguishable from the encircling wilderness? And if the Moor slept in Sam Hough’s pillow-bier, then, by the shade of Othello (who used a pillow for quite a different purpose), where did Sam sleep? We must fill in the picture for ourselves. History, in its surviving fragments, offers us no further aid; and Tradition, still so young as to be inarticulate, avails us no whit.

Mrs. Eaton’s reference to the grievance of bed-making, and her allusion to her maid, dimly adumbrate the first of another great type of college characters—the “goody.” Some years later this hazy figure is brought into sharper focus when the Corporation “concluded that Old Mary be yet connived at to be in the College, with a charge to take heed to do her work undertaken, and to give content to the College and students.” This would appear the first instance where a member of