Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/349

 and admonished for receiving scholars at his dwelling, said scholars having shot Captain Gookin’s turkeys and brought them there to be cooked. Six years later he was “solemnly cautioned” by the Overseers “of enterteyning any of the students in his house, frequenting the Colledges, or drawing them otherwise into his company.” Nothing daunted, he continued to ply a risky but highly lucrative traffic with his young friends. President Mather complained that he “put them to unnecessary expences at the cost of their Parents’’; and there is evidence that when they were short of cash he was not above “receiving and taking their apparell.”

Gibson’s operations, in course of time, reached an astonishing pitch of magnitude and effrontery. He “frequented the college” so boldly that he actually arranged turkey suppers in the students’ rooms, and brought with him a band of choice spirits to enliven the evening. In 1685 the Corporation sued him again, alleging that he and his crew “were accustomed to play the Rake in college more than formerly, some of them staying there the whole night. Last winter their custom was to meet together night after night, also to drive a trade of stealing turkeys, Geese, and other fowl until they had so cloyed themselves that they left them stinking in some of the chambers and studies of the students before they could get them dressed.” He was again fined by the