Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/358

 known by heart to half New England. It still remains a classic example—save the mark!—of early American comic verse. And through this unworthy tribute, by the glimmer of this veritable rushlight of the Muses, the old Harvard bed-maker has attained a flickering sort of immortality. Still, the tribute may not have been so inappropriate after all. John’s verses were probably quite as good as Matthew’s sweeping.

The Widow Abdy, we may say, succeeded to her husband’s post, and swept on through the corridors of Time until 1762, when she expired at the sprightly age of ninety-three. She too appears to have been a striking feature of the collegiate landscape, for her obituary describes her as “well known to all who have had an Education here within the present Century.” During her last years she had the doubtful benefit of a coadjutor, whose habits fully maintained the standard then apparently expected of the college “help.” All that we know of him is from a single entry in the diary of Jeremy Belknap of the class of 1762: