“serving-room” is a very modern improvement in the art of dining. The screen in fact persisted up to the time Memorial Hall was built, though in that case it projected from the side wall, as a more central location.
In the dining-hall each table held two “messes” (appropriate term!) of eight or ten men apiece. The students sat by classes, and at first in their order of social precedence as established by the catalogue, the most aristocratic receiving the earliest attention and the best portions of the dish. Afterwards, groups of congenial cronies were allowed to mess together, an arrangement more conducive to good feeling, but also more favorable to the hatching of plots and disorders.[1] The tutors, or “fellows,” and graduate students sat at a raised table, supervised the decorum of the meal, and took turns in asking the blessing and returning thanks.[2] (The President dined in his own house.) At the high table also sat such few undergraduates as felt sufficiently assured of
- ↑ Willard, Memories of Youth and Manhood, ii, 192.
- ↑ In post-Revolutionary times a “college law” required that if the tutors were absent, a senior should take the head of the table and ask the blessing. In 1800 the seniors refused to do this if the tutor was merely late, and resolved “to take the head of the table alphabetically, & in case any fine should be inflicted, will make ourselves responsible for payment. Should anyone be rusticated, or even suspended, we unammously agree to quit College.” Accordingly Abbot took the head of the table, omitted the blessing, and was fined twenty cents. The next day the law was ‘‘dispensed with, providing we wait till a tutor entered. Thus he conceded, & we have obtained, our point.” Diary of Timothy Fuller (H. C. 1801). Cambridge Hist. Soc. Proceedings, xi, 48.
