Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/61

 nothing of numerous minor alterations, can be traced from the scanty records, which are doubtless incomplete. With a curious disregard of its intrinsic beauty and its hallowed associations, it has always been regarded as the legitimate prey of the experimenter and the innovator. For a century and a half it has been forced to adjust itself, like a species of architectural safety-valve or “expansion joint,” to the varying needs of the College in every successive phase of development. Sometimes facing east and sometimes west, sometimes containing one apartment and sometimes seven, it has endured such protean transformations as only its sturdy brick walls (two feet thick) could have withstood. Doors, windows, chimneys, cupolas, stairs, passages, porches, partitions, floors, pews, stages, shutters, pulpits, furnaces, have appeared and disappeared, multiplied and decreased, enlarged and contracted, upon, within, and around it, like tricks from a conjuror’s box. “Presto, change!” seems to have been its motto. The annals of ecclesiastical architecture scarcely afford a parallel.

And through it all, this patient drudge, this comely but modest University maid-of-all-work, has been rewarded with little save abuse and neglect. Although with the exception of Massachusetts Hall the oldest college building now standing, no tablet of honor adorns