Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/348

 the dishevelled sisterhood is recognized nominatim in the official books of the University. One likes to fancy Old Mary was Mrs. Eaton’s original slavey, now a wrinkled crone, “connived at” to retain her post by ancient prescriptive right, but plainly as cross-grained and inefficient as ever.

Thus early appear examples of two chief classes of characters, the scout and the goody. Almost as early emerges a third, the undesirable citizen who attaches himself to the institution on pretexts of his own, worms himself into the confidence of the students, and makes himself a nuisance, if nothing worse. The most notorious of these parasites in the seventeenth century was Samuel Gibson. He was one of those pleasant rogues who were probably much more numerous among our revered forefathers than we care to acknowledge. His house, on the remote outskirts of the village (in the present Sparks Street), was as near being a den of iniquity as the straitness and simplicity of the times allowed. There he and his equally unprincipled spouse for many years played the host to the richer and more adventurous of the students—the original “Fast Set at Harvard”—in midnight revelries. The sources of the menu in particular were thrillingly irregular, poultry stolen by the revellers usually forming the chief dishes.

As early as 1672 Gibson was fined 40s. by the court