Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/80

 mand nearly up to the Revolution. Towards that date there are also traces of the very unusual addition of a troop of cavalry.

If the scholars could not take part in the training days on Cambridge Common, at their very doors, they could act as spectators, so long as they did not transgress the early college law forbidding them to “bee present at or in any of the Publike Civil meetings, or Concourse of people, as Courts of justice, elections, fayres, or at Military exercise in the time or howers of the Colledge exercise, Publike or private.” We can fancy them lining the edge of the training field, and jeering unmercifully at the preposterous evolutions (or convolutions) they were not allowed to share. Sometimes their “sour grapes” attitude became decidedly troublesome. A lively example of their pranks is found in the Faculty Records of July 8, 1760, in the case of Michael James Trollet, who came all the way from Surinam to join the class of 1763, but who did not succeed in staying with them long.

w'th Respect to Trollet. Col’o Brattle having made complaint to us, That the s’d Trollet grossly insulted his train’d Comp’a w'h under Arms, by firing a Squib or Serpent among their firelocks when loaded & primed & all grounded, w’rby he great[ly] endangered the limbs @ least of the Souldiors & Spectators; yet he (Coll’o Brattle) having said, That he wou’d not desire the said Trollet shou’d be animadverted upon by us; Provided he wou’d give Satisfaction to him for that his Offence, Therefore agreed, that before we consider