ing in the dock, He was proved an arrant rascal. Besides his flagrant breach of the peace and his false pretences in religion, the fellow was in debt to the enormous amount of a thousand pounds, mostly obtained by fraudulent bills of exchange. Yet so great was the veneration[1] of the little Puritan commonwealth for learning and all its exponents, that he would probably have got off with an admonition, if it had not been for the evidence as to the food he had been giving his pupils.
Oh, that food! Although Eaton received “large allowance” for “dieting,” it was mostly “porrige and pudding, and that very homely,” served “without butter or suet.” (Members of Harvard’s oldest club will notice that the College was founded on Pudding, and that successive strata of that pabulum crop out at frequent intervals in the course of this survey.) His wife, on whom Eaton tried to “put it off,” admitted that “the flower was not so fine as it might, nor so well boiled and stirred”; that “‘the fish was bad”; that as for “beef, they never had it”; and that her spouse “would call
- ↑ Eaton had the prestige of being a pupil of the celebrated Dr. William Ames at the University of Franeker in Holland (abolished by Napoleon). In 1687 he was granted the extraordinary privilege of exemption from the tax rate, “leaveing it to his discretion what he will freely give towards these charges.” Just before his downfall he was considered so indispensable that he was granted 500 acres of land “if hee continew his imployment with us for his life, to bee to him & his heires.” Colonial Society Transactions, xiv, 63. Strong pressure was brought to bear from influential sources against trying him at all.
