when some young rascals contrived to slip six hundred grains of tartar emetic into the copper where the morning’s coffee was boiling. Before breakfast was half over the entire personnel had rushed precipitately from the hall—including the conspirators, who to avoid suspicion had taken twice as much coffee as anyone else.[1] That this hell-brew was drunk unsuspectingly by everybody affords a singular commentary on the ordinary flavor of the morning beverage to which the College was then accustomed.
By 1812, the encroachments of the increasing library and apparatus threatened to squeeze Commons out of Harvard Hall, and the Corporation appointed a committee “to devise the form and site of a building in the College grounds to include a Commons hall.” This resulted in the erection of University Hall, wherein the whole first floor and basement were specially arranged for dining purposes, and in the transfer of the Commons thither in 1816. With the fatuous hope of preventing further disorder, the meals were now served in four separate rooms, one for each class. But like gunpowder placed in enclosed chambers, the explosions were only the more violent. Circular windows, suggesting overgrown portholes—still easily recognizable—had been cut in the partitions, and through these and the open
- ↑ From a MS. journal, quoted in Hall, College Words and Customs, 181.
