Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/386

 black, whose harmless obsession it was to wander from one college to another, recounting his stupendous adventures wherever he could collect a knot of reasonably remunerative listeners; and the poor demented lady who handed out pamphlets warning one of Russian spies (those were the days of the Nihilists) so malign and ubiquitous that they concealed themselves in the very walls of the dormitories.

There was Clary, the darkey janitor and factotum of the laboratory in Boylston Hall. And here one is compelled to quote F. W. Hackett of ’61:

There was John Ryan of the “Holly Tree Inn,” that grubby prototype of the quick-lunch parlors,—John, red-headed and red-shirted, whose marvellous dropped eggs on toast still linger ethereally on the gustatory nerve,—John, “conscientiously swabbing his oilcloth-