custom to indulge their inoffensive vagaries unchecked. So through the half-remembered twilight of Harvard’s beginnings flit shadowy hints of college characters as piquant as any of their successors.
Let us dip into the “confession” of Mrs. Eaton, the first housekeeper of the little boarding-school (for it was nothing more), in the year of grace 1639:
And that they made their beds at any time, were my straits never so great, I am sorry they were ever put to it. For the Moor his lying in Sam. Hough’s sheet and pillow-bier,[1] it hath a truth in it: he did so one time, and it gave Sam. Hough just cause of offence; and that it was not prevented by my care and watchfulness, I desire to take the shame and the sorrow for it. And that they eat the Moor’s crusts, and the swine and they had share and share alike, and the Moor to have beer, and they denied it, and if they had not enough, for my maid to answer, they should not, I am an utter stranger to these things, and know not the least footsteps for them so to charge me.[2]
What ebony face with rolling white eyeballs grins sheepishly at us from this mildewed page? Who was this blackamoor who surreptitiously helped himself to
- ↑ This fine old Chaucerian word (pronounced “pillyber’’) was in general use up to the middle of the last century. It seems strange that such a comparative luxury as a pillow-case should have been considered an essential part of an old-time student’s outfit In 1637, Charles Gawdy of Caius College, Cambridge, England, wrote to his father for “two or thre paire of sheets and two or thre pillowbeares.” Venn, Early Collegiate Life, 217. In 1777 Sylvanus Bourne of Harvard, in one of his letters, observed that he was glad his mother would “‘take home with her the Pilla bier,” which probably needed mending. Bourne MSS, Harvard College Library
- ↑ Savage, Winthrop’ s History of New England, i, 378 n. Original preserved in the Massachusetts State Archives.
