Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/351

 for “lodging strangers without leave,” and the same sum for “entertaming persons of ill character.” The offence, seemingly, was neither uncommon nor particularly serious, since the fines for profanity, card-playing, etc., were considerably greater. Imagine an ingenious undergrad of to-day summoned before the Dean on a charge, let us say, of sharing his room with a professional bootlegger, and, relying on precedent, offering to compound the matter for twenty-five cents!

By the beginning of the eighteenth century the outside catering for the scholars began to be taken over, on a somewhat more legitimate basis, by Jonathan Hastings, who lived on the present Massachusetts Avenue opposite the end of the Common. At any rate we hear of fat geese roasted at his fire for students’ suppers, which were now accompanied by the efforts of a poet, a toast-master, and other rudimentary appendages of the modern banquet. Mr. Hastings also “accommodated” by letting horses to the collegians. It is to be hoped that he always succeeded in collecting the hire; but there is some question, for he was as much noted for the slowness and softness of his wits as for the lankiness and awkwardness of his person—being, in short, as a friend euphoniously described him, “no conjuror.”

One peculiarity of his deserves more than a passing mention. He had somewhere adopted or invented the