Harvard, where he peddled his uninviting wares from 1843 to his death in 1861.
If Pop’s leading card was eloquence, Jimmy’s was pathos. His pathetic basket contained (besides a few boxes of incombustible matches) little but candy, and that of such an aged, dusty, and indigestible look as to excite only commiseration, and to extort the pennies of charity rather than of ordinary commerce. He was noted for his low opinion of freshmen, often declaring, with undoubted truth, that at least a year’s residence at Cambridge was necessary to appreciate the quality of his merchandise. Pathetic too was his domestic history, his wife and two boys having died in succession, leaving him heart-broken and utterly alone. Most pathetic of all was his appearance—a bent, tattered, wrecked old man, hardly less thin than his own sticks of candy, who shivered in winter beneath a threadbare, flapping blue cloak, and feebly chafed his hands almost as blue. Those who heard it could never forget the trembling voice with which he delivered his invariable greeting, “Here’s Jimmy!”[1]
Assuredly we cannot leave this branch of our subject without a word of eulogy for the successor of these early purveyors, that prince of all Harvard characters, John Lovett—“John the Orangeman.” A native of County
- ↑ Harv. Magazine, ii, 399, vii, 147, 240 (1860); Harv. Grad. Mag., xxiii, 69.
